I'm curious why websites built with frameworks like React tend to feel sluggish, especially when you consider that games like Quake 3 could run smoothly at 60fps on a Pentium II in the 90s. Fast forward 30 years, and it seems like anything more than a simple React project is a laggy experience even with decent hardware. I have an M4 Pro with 48GB of RAM, so I'd like to understand why this is the case. Isn't it supposed to be easier to build efficient web apps now than back then?
4 Answers
Another big factor is the way developers today often just pick libraries for convenience without considering the overall efficiency of their apps. It’s like they’ve forgotten about the fundamentals of web performance. In many cases, it's the choice of technology and lack of optimization that slows things down. Quake 3 was built with raw performance in mind, where modern devs often prioritize flashy features over speed.
Exactly, and it feels like the industry is more about trends and less about building performant applications.
You nailed it. The modern web is not just heavier in terms of content, but there's a lot more happening in the background. Older web pages loaded quickly as they were mostly rendered server-side. Now, we often rely on client-side rendering, which requires a hefty amount of JS to be executed before the user sees anything loading. All these extra layers and abstractions can introduce significant delays, especially when you’re waiting for multiple requests and big libraries to load.
Right? And you add in those analytics codes, and you’re just piling on the needless weight.
Exactly! If you have a lot of requests being made all at once, it becomes a huge bottleneck. It’s often not the rendering that’s the issue, but the time to retrieve that data.
The slowness of modern web apps really comes down to how heavy the JavaScript load has become. Back in the day, websites were primarily HTML with some light JavaScript sprinkled in for interactivity. Nowadays, apps are overloaded with JavaScript, styles, and tracking scripts that really weigh everything down. When I tested one site, it took about 13MB and over 120 individual HTTPS requests to load just the homepage! You wouldn’t even be able to load most of these sites on a dial-up connection. The web's just ballooned into a complicated mess!
Totally agree! We’ve added so much unnecessary bloat. If we optimized images and dropped many of those tracking scripts, we could definitely speed things up.
I think ad blockers could help improve the load times by cutting down on all that unnecessary stuff. Have you tried it?
It's a combination of factors, really. The emphasis has shifted away from the performance that was crucial in the early web days to a focus on features and look-and-feel. The reality is that modern web apps can be highly performant, but that requires a lot of continuous optimization, which many teams don’t prioritize. The result? Laggy experiences when surfing the web, an issue that could easily be solved with some effort and optimization know-how.
For sure! It’s a shame because there are still some fantastic tools and practices out there that can help boost performance.
And let’s not forget—more money is spent on user experience than on the foundation to actually make it a good experience. Layers and layers of frameworks without understanding the bottlenecks.
Yeah, optimization just isn't as prioritized as it should be now. Most younger devs don’t even know how to write efficient plain HTML and CSS anymore!