They don't say "modern software is slow", they say "my computer is slow, I need to buy a new one" and they do.
Let's be honest: for what the vast majority of people do on their computer, there is absolutely no need for a Macbook M3. The only reason is that the websites are developed by people who buy (or get from their company) a Macbook M3 and therefore don't see how much their website sucks on a reasonable machine.
I can track it very well on my father's homepage which has been the same for 25 years. He has a 4 years old desktop mac and the webpage takes more than 20s to load. On an M3 it takes 2s. This homepage is still loading exactly the same kind of information than 25 years ago, yet it is almost unbearable on a 4 years old desktop computer. Does my father say that this webpage is slow? No, because all software goes like this. My father says that his computer is now old and considers buying a new one.
How long did it take to load 20 years ago, on a 20 year old PC/Mac ? - seems like a very big page?
And of course now it loads a ton of useless widgets, probably much bigger images (sometimes they load a video to serve the same purpose, just because they can), and a whole lot more code. And that's with uBlock origins; if I disable it it's a lot worse.
Objectively, in 25 years they have been paying people to make it an order of magnitude worse. And it's not only them: the vast majority of websites have followed that trend.
There are very few instances I can think of for the last 4 years where I heard anyone complaining like this about the general state of these things. There’s a few offenders I can think of, like Salesforce, but I haven’t heard from any non technical users especially about things like Gmail being slow or their browsers being too slow.
Whet I often hear instead to be honest is people widely seem surprised when they have 200 tabs open in Chrome and everything still feels fast to them
That’s not to say performance isn’t important, it really is, in fact I’m the performance czar where I work, I spend along time on optimizations and performance.
However the acceptable performance threshold is dependent on the activity more than anything I’ve found. That’s why it’s such a big deal in e-commerce but people don’t seem to care as much for longer lived apps, otherwise Jira might actually be snappy
Now of course there is a threshold regardless of app where it will things negatively, losing customers etc. and thus it shouldn’t be ignore either
They ask me to call our ISP because it makes no sense that the sites they have used for decades feel so slow
All I could say was that there was nothing I could do.
YouTube is also great for this, like, 1/50 navigation clicks just results in a blank page with no error message. Ctrl-R to the rescue.
Or the number of times Reddit's infinite scroll just... dies. Somewhere in the background, I don't know where.
Like I can't think of any of these major platform websites where shit isn't just constantly tripping over it's own dick and breaking in often humorous but also just ridiculous ways.
They also don’t represent the overall web. I think it would be more far to take a sum of websites used, as opposed to number of users.
It’s a valid concern (as I think performance always is to be clear) but the majority are not on higher latency / limited bandwidth connections like 5G internet service as their primary ISP delivery tech.
Vast majority are in cable or fiber at this point, given urban saturation