I use an Intel Atom netbook from 2010 as my test system. It has 1 GB of RAM and an in-order x86 processor. CPU Benchmark gives it 120 Mop/s integer and 42 MiB/s for AES. (For comparison, my usual laptop, which is also nearly obsolete with an i5-8350u gives 22,000 Mop/s and 2000 MiB/s respectively.)

The netbook can load Firefox in just a few seconds. And Hacker News loads almost instantly as on a modern machine. (Hit enter and the page is rendered before you can blink.)

The same machine can also play back 720p H.264 video smoothly.

And yet, if I go to Youtube or just about any other modern site, it takes literally a minute to load and render, none of the UI elements are responsive, and the site is unusable for playing videos. Why? I'm not asking for anything the hardware isn't capable of doing.

If my own work isn't snappy on the Atom I consider it a bug. There are a lot of people using smartphones and tablets with processors in the same class.

Youtube serves AV1 video these days, which needs CPU rendering on older machines. It might become usable if you switch it to 144p resolution. (For reference, such low-resolution video was very common in the mid-1990s, so it's not wildly out of place on a machine from 2010.)

If it goes down you can always upgrade to a Raspberry Pi 3B+.

> And yet, if I go to Youtube or just about any other modern site, it takes literally a minute to load and render, none of the UI elements are responsive, and the site is unusable for playing videos. Why? I'm not asking for anything the hardware isn't capable of doing.

but the website and web renderer are definitely not optimized for a netbook from 2010 - even modern smartphones are better at rendering pages and video than your atom (or even 8350u) computers.