[pcwalton]

> And the new stuff, especially Firefox, is coming full circle in how friggin' slow they run to serve the lowest common denominator of web pages.

It should be easy to find performance numbers showing how Firefox 42 renders old, pre-CSS pages slower than, say, Netscape 4, then.

Netscape 4 didn't have a JIT, didn't use hardware accelerated layers, trapped into kernel mode for GDI calls, didn't use accelerated SIMD for painting, and didn't have HTTP 2. It barely had any optimizations for dynamic restyling, so tons of stuff would get reflowed when it didn't have to. This is just the tip of the iceberg.

Browsers have gotten more complex, but the complexity is often in the service of making things faster.

[nickpsecurity]

Notice my references to Web 1.0, 2.0, etc? That means my comment was talking about not just the browsers but the sites designed for them. The combination of the two have made web sites really slow that could be designed to load up instantly. Instead, they load up as slowly as some sites did on my old Pentium 2 running Opera, etc. You'd think they'd be significantly faster with all the Moore's law iterations and browser improvements. Modern sites make sure that doesn't happen, though.

And I never mentioned Netscape: it was called Netscrape then and hackers despised it. I used Opera and IE mainly.

[pcwalton]

Opera and IE were no different in architecture.

[ZenoArrow]

What are you referring to? Opera and IE certainly used different rendering engines: Trident for IE, Presto for Opera (before it moved to Blink).

[pcwalton]

Back in the Netscape 4 days, the architectures of those engines were broadly the same (in the sense that Linux and FreeBSD have broadly the same architecture). Of course the codebases were different.

[ZenoArrow]

How do you know this? Trident and Presto were both closed source, did you do some contract work with both Microsoft and Opera at the time?

[pcwalton]

Presto wasn't released until 2003.

In the late '90s, the time frame this thread is about, it was well known that the layout engines at the time were not dynamic: they could not in general reflow only parts of the page. Everything else I mentioned in the post that triggered this subthread is obvious simply based on browser engine and OS history.

[nickpsecurity]

Wasnt aware of that. Interesting.

It was just faster, better looking, and skinnable. Plus malware stayed hitting IE so there was that too.

[ZenoArrow]

I don't think the statement you replied to is correct.

[nickpsecurity]

Yep. No point in fixing it though.