What about the question "do web pages work any better than they did in 2007?" when we were using full page reloads and server side logic instead of Javascipt tricks.
I see so much basic brokenness on the web today from the back button not working to horribly overloaded news websites with mystery-meat mobile navigation I find myself wondering what have we really achieved in the last 9 years? This stuff used to work
Thaaaaaaaat's nonsense. I had relatively high-res CRTs (1600x1200) in the late 90s and early 2000s.
My father and I were able to get by with Netscape Navigator and Firefox for quite awhile as well.
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/uk.comp.os.linux/5c40N...
> "Sorry, the Argos Internet site cannot currently be viewed using Netscape 6 or other browsers with the same rendering engine.
> In the meantime, please use a different web browser or call 0870 600 2020 to order items from the Argos catalogue."
> Sorry, I think I'll shop elsewhere until you get it fixed...
Argos was sniffing the useragent. I think people tried changing the useragent, and it worked fine.
This kind of thing wasn't rare, even in 2003.
And it is not rare now either. Nothing has changed in that regard. Things have just gotten massively slower, use insane amounts of CPU, and are less functional.
client-side logic, done right is much improved over a server-side solution.
My wired desktop gets DNS responses from 8.8.8.8 nearly as if it were in my network, in way under 10 ms, ping responses in 2 ms or so. Accessing websites hosted in e.g. Korea takes >100 ms.
Add a congested wireless connection somewhere (WLAN or mobile network) and you can add another few hundred ms. And neither cross-continent nor congested wireless latency is going to go away.