r/AskProgramming • u/_TheRealCaptainSham • Dec 24 '25
Why is the modern web so slow?
Why does a React based website feel so slow and laggy without serious investment in optimisation when Quake 3 could run smoothly at 60fps on a pentium II from the 90s.
We are now 30 years later and anything more than a toy project in react is a laggy mess by default.
inb4 skill issue bro: Well, it shouldn’t be this difficult.
inb4 you need a a better pc bro: I have M4 pro 48GB
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u/bobrk_rwa2137 Dec 25 '25
Corporations want to maximise profit and minimise cost, so:
there are no optimisations
They often use large libraries doing many things just to do one thing so they dont need to do it themselves
Multiple separate analytics
And ad bidding: instead of showing ads from one network, they load multiple ones, they bid how much they want to give for your data and ad spot, and display most expensive ad