But we are talking about something as simple as opening safari and camera app. How does that glitch and require 2.5x the performance 7 years later with no hardware changes whatsoever to the camera and network/ssd/display etc.
The software is optimized for devices with 2x the performance and 3x the RAM. It's no surprise at all that it's slow.
Newer versions of iOS use significantly more RAM than older versions. I'd estimate that OS RAM usage increased from ~1GB to ~1.5-2GB. This has minimal effect on newer phones with 12GB of RAM, but on older phones such as the iPhone 11 with 4GB of RAM the performance impact is noticeable. Userspace apps spend more time paging and are slower.
Also, webpages have gotten 2-5x heavier over the past decade. App sizes have increased by a similar multiplier.
Firefox on iOS today is far more bloated than the version released a decade ago. It has more features, more bloat, and will run slower than the version released years ago. Claiming "It hasn't happened to Firefox" is a lie and that's why you deflected.
Setting aside the functional implications of disabling JS, can you help me square the two?
> ...webpages have gotten 2-5x heavier over the past decade...
I don't think anyone is arguing that modern browsers can't load old web pages quickly. And HN still loads plenty fast on an old iOS device.
One minute it's "they still work fine on older devices", the next minute it's 'I have to disable JS for the modern web to be usable'.
> Userspace apps spend more time paging and are slower.
This is right in the current thread.
In reality, both local apps and websites do not have to get heavier in order to provide more features. Apple is effectively slowing down everything (as do typical web developers). And yet KDE, Firefox, HN, Mastodon prove that this is not exactly unavoidable.
The developers of Firefox for iOS made the willful choice to bloat their app, not Apple.