Recently I was tutoring (for college essays and math) at a local high/middle school and most students browsed the web on their smart phones, but those that didn't were limited to school issued Chromebooks which were ungodly slow. Some of these students served as translators for their parents and I was under the impression that they used these devices to pay bills and for other household tasks as well. This experience is why to this day I try to keep the websites I make light on dependancies (I don't like react) and fast to load (sub 300kb ideally).
I used to do email/browsing/games on 8MB of RAM. Upgraded to 24MB and was able to print a poster sized photo that I scanned with a handheld scanner.
I have 2000x as much RAM now, about 3000x more CPU, but hard to say what really changed for so much increase.
Yeah, full motion video is now more trivial. Gaming graphics certainly improved but not 1000x more fun.
I probably have more computing power today in my room than medium sized universities had back in the day.
Heavy CSS animations, Javascript bloat is what slows down the websites and literally ruins the web experience.
I ported jbig2 (17kb uncompressed) and codec2 (60kb uncompressed) to wasm which enables me to use really small image and audio files in my web app. I also made a custom read only database and search engine with built-in zstd decompressor (39kb uncompressed). It probably wouldn't run on a psp though.
I like optimizing and making things small. I want to use neural audio codecs for even better compression but the model sizes and compute complexity are major hurdles and muddy the vision.
With a 60kb codec2 decoder you need about 2 minutes of audio to start saving.
But the target is dictionary apps with thousands of seconds of audio and thousands of images.
If you looked at the gov.uk page [1] that he linked, it is clean and readable. It doesn't look hard to me to make, and I don't think it is lacking functionality.
I'll grant that writing web-apps without a framework is going to be harder for many people (especially with all the fancy features that are expected now days), but that is not the point of this writing. This is an argument that the web (especially government services) should be usable on limited devices too.
Anyways, I disagree with the idea that we should make something simple enough for PSPs and car browsers. Just go to a library.
NYT has gotten so bloated both in actual content (long meandering interviews) as well as the encapsulating junk. I started to put it into Gemini to summarize. During this process I found, the two hour interview transcript was 50% actual words and 50% junk (probably formatting, tracking, adware, surveillance?).
The junk made me feel dirty.
Some discussion at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25915313
And a more recent incarnation or variation:
Using Claude Code: The unreasonable effectiveness of HTML
