alt Hacker News> Browser rendering engines are pretty mature at this point, with significant GPU acceleration, and over a decade stress-testing by bloated web apps.
They suck on older hardware. Old Chromebooks are a dime a dozen and are decently spec'd light use or purpose-use machines. Browsers run like crap on them.
Web tech in general is responsible for a lot of unnecessary hardware turnover.
If you dig up an 18 year old Core 2 Duo box, upgrade its storage to a cheap SSD, and install Linux on it, it’s shocking how snappy and usable it is for most tasks… up until you open a web browser or Electron app. Then it all falls apart.
Had it not been for resource creep driven overwhelmingly by heavy web apps and Electron/CEF, there’d be little reason for most people to use anything more powerful than a Sandy Bridge machine and we could have laptops and smartphones with week-long battery life thanks to efficiency gains not needing to be consumed by performance increases.