> I very well remember heavy, slow-loading websites of, say, year 2000, without any SPA stuff, even though lightweight, quick-loading pages existed even then, in the epoch of dial-up internet.

Sure, lightweight, quick-loading pages existed, but sometimes you want to see a picture.

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nine_k 4 days ago | parent [-]

Google appeared in 1998. It was very noticeable how fast it loaded compared to competitors like AltaVista and Yahoo. None of them featured large photos.

This was visible not only on a 33600 phone connection at home, but also on a megabit connection at work, because, shockingly, how fast your backend is also plays a major role.

	▲	Izkata 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		Speaking of speed, don't forget when gmail and google maps first came out: With the data copied locally they could separate the UI from server requests for a lot of interactions so a lot of the UI was actually instant and you could keep doing things while the requests were handled in the background. This seems to have been missed by a lot of modern stuff that doesn't bother figuring out if this is even possible and opts to show a loading spinner instead.