Nobody Ever Learns… (5G Edition)

5G Will Definitely Make the Web Slower, Maybe | Filament Group, Inc.

So network performance stands to get much faster very soon. That should alleviate the web’s performance problems right?

Well, it should, but I don’t expect it will. At least not soon. If recent trends continue, 5G just might make web performance worse, not better, for the average person.

Sigh. Nobody ever learns. New technology speeds things up, so developers (and users, to a degree) move to fatter apps / websites, thus negating most of the advance, and making older systems (PCs, and now smartphones) almost unusable.

Today, JavaScript is the major culprit.

The average device is not the brand new thousand-dollar iPhone with 3 lenses for taking photographs. The average device even in the US is the sort of device that you see on the Amazon Best Sellers, which can run about $130. It might be an iPhone, but it’s probably an older one. It’s most likely to be a mid-range Android, with a relatively underpowered processor.