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might be a form of Jevons Paradox
(lemmy.blahaj.zone)
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this post was submitted on 12 Mar 2026
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You do really feel this when you're using old hardware.
I have an iPad that's maybe a decade old at this point. I'm using it for the exact same things I was a decade ago, except that I can barely use the web browser. I don't know if it's the browser or the pages or both, but most web sites are unbearably slow, and some simply don't work, javascript hangs and some elements simply never load. The device is too old to get OS updates, which means I can't update some of the apps. But, that's a good thing because those old apps are still very responsive. The apps I can update are getting slower and slower all the time.
It's the pages. It's all the JavaScript. And especially the HTML5 stuff. The amount of code that is executed in a webpage these days is staggering. And JS isn't exactly a computationally modest language.
Of the 200kB loaded on a typical Wikipedia page, about 85kb of it is JS and CSS.
Another 45kB for a single SVG, which in complex cases is a computationally nontrivial image format.
I don't agree. It's both. I've opened basic no JS sites on old tablets to test them out and even those pages BARELY load
What caused the latency in that case?
Probably just the browser itself, considering how bloated they're getting. It's not super surprising, considering the apps run about as fast (on a good day) as it did 5-10 years ago on a new phone, it's gonna run like dogshit on a phone from that era.
I can't update YouTube on my iPad 2 that I got running again for the first time in years. It said it had been 70,000~ hours since last full charge. I wanted to use it to watch videos on when I'm going to bed. But I can't actually login to YouTube because the app is so old and I seemingly can't update it.
I was using the web browser and yeah I don't remember it being so damn slow. It's crazy how that is.
Is your iPad on iOS 9.3.5? It is infamously slow.
It is possible to downgrade it to 8.4.1 (faster, partially more broken) or even 6.1.3 (fast and old school, many apps don't work, but there are apps in Cydia to fix stuff).
Biggest issue I encountered is sites requiring TLSv1.3 for HTTPS encryption, and browsers simply do not support that.
I have an old YouTube app on my iPad, and it still works fine. One of the more responsive apps on the device. I get nagged nearly every time I use it to update to the newest YouTube release, but that's impossible. I'd first have to upgrade my OS, and Apple no longer releases new OSes for this generation of iPads. So, I'm stuck with an old YouTube, which mostly works fine, and an occasional nag message.
I'm sure within a year or two mine will be like yours and YouTube will simply no longer work. But, for now it's in a relatively good spot where I can use a version of YouTube designed for this particular hardware that doesn't feel sluggish.