I know it’s a meme on HN to complain that modern websites are slow, but this is a perfect example of how completely distorted views of the past can get.
No, browsing the web in the early 90s was slooow. Even simple web pages took a long time to load. As you said, internet connections were very slow too. I remember visiting pages with photos that would come with a warning about the size of the page, at which point I’d get up and go get a drink or take a break while it loaded. Then scrolling pages with images would feel like the computer was working hard.
It’s silly to claim that 90s web browsers ran about as fast as they do today.
Web pages took a minute to load, now we're optimising them for instant response.
It also was a simpler time, the technology was in peoples lives but as a small side quest to their main lives. It took the form of a bulky desktop in the den or something like that. When you walked away from that beige box, it didn't follow or know about the rest of your life.
A life where a Big Mac meal was only $2.99, a toyota corolla was $9-15k, houses were ~100k, and when average dev salaries were ~50k. That was a different life. I don't know why but I picture this music video that was included on the Windows 95 cd bonus folder when I think of this simulacra: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iqL1BLzn3qc
I had t3 connections for most of my browsing which was faster than ethernet of the day - even by todays standards that isn't too bad. I avoided dialup if I could because it was slow. Even isdn was okay speeds.
Your claim that I responded to was that web browsers were just as fast on 25MHz CPUs.
> I had t3 connections for most of my browsing which was faster than ethernet of the day - even by todays standards that isn't too bad.
T3 speeds are very slow in today's terms. Even my cell phone does a couple orders of magnitude better from where I'm sitting.
There are a lot of weird claims going on in your posts. I think it's a lot of nostalgia coloring your views of how fast things were in the past.
This is the same pattern you see in politics when people on all sides (even the nominally progressive ones) lie to each other about how great the olden days were, when in reality it's all about their dissatisfaction with the present day.
This is like saying Victorian Britain wasn't polluted, except for all the coal burning.
Try using a 2400baud modem, that was slow
Because all of the complicated client side stuff was in Java applets or Shockwave :( Pepperidge Farm remembers having to wait 10 minutes for a GameBoy emulator to load to play Pokémon Yellow on school computers…