#and i see those dozen tracker/ad sites you're trying to get to load

[awkward-teabag]

This was what I was taught in school. You make sure the site works on different browsers and at different resolutions and you absolutely do not rely on hardware to compensate for you being a bad designer.

Granted this was the 00s so hardware acceleration wasn't much of a thing but still, the most important part of your job was that the site didn't punish people for their hardware/OS/resolution/browser. If people couldn't use it (or could but it was broken and/or slow), you failed.

Even in the days of Angelfire and Neocities 1.0 where gif- and midi-infested sites were a risk, if you looked up how to build a website, you'd be told not to use them just because you could and to be mindful of what others may have to deal with such as speakers turned on (don't play music unprompted and certainly don't jack up the volume and hide the pause button if you do), don't use bmps for images because they're godawfully massive and people may have slow internet and/or a data cap that a few images could take a chunk out of, make your site legible (your ~aesthetic~ doesn't make white text on yellow background readable), and so on.

Even during the MySpace era, a lot of this still held true and was seen as something you just did if you at all cared about people who would see your site.

But then hardware acceleration became commonplace and the internet became more corporarized by people who didn't have to worry about dial up, data caps, or using a machine more than 5 years old in their personal experience. Now so much of it relys on hardware to compensate for bad optimization and prioritizing looks over function and, even with widgets, you basically have to gut it and rebuild it from scratch to get away from it eating RAM like it's trying to download a car.

To say nothing of the added strain that ads cause.

Disabling hardware acceleration (god it's horrible and can cause so many issues), having ad block, and using script block to manually control how much Javascript I have to deal with is the only way to use some sites and get me to not click away out of frustration.

Sure it means some sites are broken or need to be reloaded but it makes the internet far more usable these days even with the drawbacks.

i think that web developers should be fucking required to test their shit on bad computers. it's unconscionable the way some shopping websites run.

having recently upgraded my computer from a 10-year-old castoffs build to a mid-high-grade gaming computer, it is WILD how many sites i thought were GARBAGE, just actually entirely unusable!! (one of these was ulta, but another one was an indie sex toy company!!! >O ). and it turns out they seem fine... on a computer with a near-to-highest-gen processor and a video card the size of a tank!!!!

this is ridiculous, you can't expect to sell to people when you don't know if they can't even get through checkout on your heavy-ass site! calm it tf down. make it run without 32 of gods own gIGS OF RAM. i swear to fuck