[lowwave]

> IMHO the easiest way to "make websites faster" is to stop enabling "web developers" to do the things that make them slow.

yeah as one those developers who jumped on the processing everything on the client/browser side, and supported all the browser having fancy JS features when ajax first popularised by gmail, I have come to regretted my decision. Especially with all the standards proposed by an advertising companies, the user/consumers don't really benefit from the usage of the web.

[makeitdouble]

I see it as a rare case of "hate the players not the game"

I've come to rely a lot on gitlab and github's web interfaces through the years for diff and quickly navigate a specific commit, or a project I don't want to checkout. All the improvements coming from more JS and Ajax have been a boon to me. Sure I could do everything locally, but it's just so much more convenient.

Same for gmail as you mention it: I wouldn't go back to the previous web mail interfaces short of getting paid a living salary just for that. Same for banking web sites, which came such a long way.

The technology and trend is a net plus, advertising company coming to ruin whatever they can ruin is par for the course. I mean, looking at newspaper, TVs, Google Search, YouTube, Instagram, AppStore search etc....making anything it touches worse is in the ad business' DNA.

[lowwave]

For sure, I agree that the ajax UI/UX offered by gmail is a game changer. And all those features that makes it convenient for users, can be accomplished without compromising security/privacy. What I don't like are companies proposing standard disguising as a some convenient feature, where in reality is just a racket to mine data from the users.