On Connection Speeds and Appropriate Technology
&gt; However, we now live in the era where a 3MB payload is considered acceptable, if not the average, to deliver fundamentally text-based web-pages.<p>The web today is terrible. For general browsing speed, I think the web peaked for me in 2001 or so. I had a 300 MHz PII, connected via 256 kbps SDSL. It flew! (Especially in BeOS.) Now, I have a 2x10-core 3.6 GHz Xeon, connected by 2 gbps fiber. It lags! Text pops in after the page has seemingly loaded, like some circa 1998 3D game. I miss click things because the page reflows after I&#x27;ve lined up what I want to click on. And these days, you can&#x27;t even disable all that JavaScript garbage, because sites just won&#x27;t work.<p>And the terribly disappointing thing is that it&#x27;s not any <i>better.</i> It&#x27;s not like Engadget is taking up 375MB of memory (six times what I had in my PII) because its review of the new Surface tablet includes interactive holograms. It&#x27;s fundamentally just text and pictures, same as 2001. We will look back on this era of the web the way we look back on 1970s cars, with V8s getting 12 miles per gallon making just 130 horsepower.