alt Hacker News> For example any news website, in order to read some text, you need to load a ton of JavaScript, ads (some even video) that add zero value to the intended purpose
I'm still running the original iPhone SE from 2016, and there are basically two things that will reliably heat up the phone and absolutely destroy the battery: news websites, and the github web frontend.
It's pathetic how many resources these things use when their main job is to essentially display some text to you. The github native app works completely fine which shows it's not a problem with the phone, it's a problem with devs not caring at all about performance.
Reading this and replying on a 2014 IPad Air. About 70% of the sites I goto work just fine. Oddly, about 1/2 of GitHub works. Old.reddit works, FB is horribly broke. So it’s clearly a resource thing. The more complicated the Javascript, the worse things run.
So it’s not only the resources needed by page, but that older devices end up in landfills.