> What has changed is the volume of data that we generate, send, receive and have to store and process.
I don't think this is true. The volume of data that a regular user generates, sends and receives has changed, but if this were the root of the problem, I'd expect to see CPUs stalling while waiting for the damn network to roll. What we see instead is CPUs spinning hot in order to display the latest list of hotties in your area.
> Nowadays kids with digital cameras can take photos that take 7-9 megabytes per photo.
And ten years ago, default settings in scanning software would result in 20-megabyte JPEGs that were processed just fine.
> Your mail client does not send your username and password as cleartext anymore. Everything is encrypted.
I think I first used SSL for email in mutt 1.4 (I might have been using it in Evolution before that, but mutt being mutt, it was a little painful to get it working, so I remember it well). That was more than ten years ago. OpenSSL itself is almost twenty years old, has been quite extensively used throughout its history, and it's the successor of another project.
> Your www browser does not send your forms (and your passwords too) as cleartext anymore. Everything is encrypted.
And yet wget-ing a page over HTTPS works fine on a 600 MHz, single-core, low-power i.MX6. So does browsing it on a 600 MHz PowerPC with a 2003-era browser, at least until the banner-carrying JS cavalry comes in.
(Not to mention -- again -- that HTTPS worked just fine ten years ago, it just wasn't as common; but it's well within the processing possibilities of a relatively modest CPU, and it's not like now your CPU is continuously spinning encrypted data for umpteen websites at the same time).
> Ten years there were no videos on facebook,
This one might be true, but videos, real-time chat and real-time video streaming were certainly available on the web, even though not on the (still recently-launched) Facebook.
Dropbox wasn't launched yet, but they hardly invented file storage and distributed access, and I am not going to start explaining why the amount of storage that a webmail provider offers should have no impact over the speed of the client-side code of their webmail interface.
I don't think this is true. The volume of data that a regular user generates, sends and receives has changed, but if this were the root of the problem, I'd expect to see CPUs stalling while waiting for the damn network to roll. What we see instead is CPUs spinning hot in order to display the latest list of hotties in your area.
> Nowadays kids with digital cameras can take photos that take 7-9 megabytes per photo.
And ten years ago, default settings in scanning software would result in 20-megabyte JPEGs that were processed just fine.
> Your mail client does not send your username and password as cleartext anymore. Everything is encrypted.
I think I first used SSL for email in mutt 1.4 (I might have been using it in Evolution before that, but mutt being mutt, it was a little painful to get it working, so I remember it well). That was more than ten years ago. OpenSSL itself is almost twenty years old, has been quite extensively used throughout its history, and it's the successor of another project.
> Your www browser does not send your forms (and your passwords too) as cleartext anymore. Everything is encrypted.
And yet wget-ing a page over HTTPS works fine on a 600 MHz, single-core, low-power i.MX6. So does browsing it on a 600 MHz PowerPC with a 2003-era browser, at least until the banner-carrying JS cavalry comes in.
(Not to mention -- again -- that HTTPS worked just fine ten years ago, it just wasn't as common; but it's well within the processing possibilities of a relatively modest CPU, and it's not like now your CPU is continuously spinning encrypted data for umpteen websites at the same time).
> Ten years there were no videos on facebook,
This one might be true, but videos, real-time chat and real-time video streaming were certainly available on the web, even though not on the (still recently-launched) Facebook.
Dropbox wasn't launched yet, but they hardly invented file storage and distributed access, and I am not going to start explaining why the amount of storage that a webmail provider offers should have no impact over the speed of the client-side code of their webmail interface.