Gmail specifically has massively improved recently for me, but I feel it tends to be more of a spikey graph than a steady trendline over time. Memory usage went

Gmail specifically has massively improved recently for me, but I feel it tends to be more of a spikey graph than a steady trendline over time. Memory usage went through the roof when they first rolled out their current redesign, despite already being far too high before. I assume Gmail will get worse again at some stage. Similarly, Google Docs & Sheets are abysmal currently; not really sure if they were ever significantly better or worse in the past. In terms of webapps, Google's approach has always seemed to be to make things that are powerful, sometimes usable, but with no focus on performance, cross-browser compat, or general industry best practice at all from a frontend engineering perspective. Any engineering quality in Google products has never in my experience lived in client-side code. This is exacerbated by the fact that "code quality" drives in other companies are often sneaked onto managerial priority lists under the guise of SEO requirements, something Google have never needed to meet.