Comment by pyman
3 days ago
The web is fast.
> Rarely in software does anyone ask for “fast.”
I don't think I can relate this article to what actually happened to the web. It went from being an unusable 3D platform to a usable 2D one. The web exploded with creativity and was out of control thanks to Flash and Director, but speeds were unacceptable. Once Apple stopped supporting it, the web became boring, and fast, very fast. A lot of time and money went into optimising the platform.
So the article is probably more about LLMs being the new Flash. I know that sounds like blasphemy, but they're both slow and melt CPUs.
The web might be fast compared to in 2005 but only if you don't normalize for average CPU performance and bandwidth. Websites that are mostly text often still manage to take remarkable amounts of time to finish rendering and stop moving things around.