[stonewareslord]

I have to disagree with this. Websites loaded slower because our connection was much slower. You’re comparing network speeds to page load times, which are different.

With today's speeds, the older internet is so much faster than “modern” sites. Some sites even have a loading bar (ex: gmail). Compared to sites with minimal/no Javascript, they’re much slower. 5s is not a good load time for a webpage especially with today's internet speeds.

[onion2k]

5s is not a good load time for a webpage especially with today's internet speeds.

I completely agree. I work to a perf budget of 200ms to first paint on the things I build. 5s is a huge amount of time to wait. It's the upper limit of what I think is acceptable.

[freehunter]

What you're describing is not a web site, but an application delivered through the web browser. Sites in the past were smaller and faster because they were just web sites. Today we have a whole host of applications delivered through the browser, with the Internet as the hard drive they're loaded from.

It's not a valid comparison at all. Compare the time it takes to download and install Thunderbird versus the time it takes to log into Gmail, and there you'll have a valid comparison. Compare the time it takes to install Office versus the time it takes to log into Excel Online and there you'll have a valid comparison. And in comparison, it's a hell of a lot faster.

[paulryanrogers]

Gmail in 2018 feels like I'm downloading Thunderbird every time it opens. Ideally I'd only need to load it all once and then it'll be cached for faster load next time. But maybe that's too much to ask when changes must be deployed multiple times a day.

And yet the Gmail experience is not significantly better than non-JS alternatives, at least for m my use cases.

[JoeAltmaier]

Irrelevant. When more resources become available(like bandwidth) we use them. The fact is pages are loading faster than 15 years ago.

Yes they could be faster, but most are still useful at a 5 second load time.