If the GMail team understands how to write performance critical code, then there must be something else to explain why they no longer do. Hmmm... by making old

If the GMail team understands how to write performance critical code, then there must be something else to explain why they no longer do. Hmmm... by making old hardware unusable, they cause hardware upgrades, and somehow that drives licensing? The simpler explanation, fitting Occam's razor, is that the GMail team does not understand how to write performance critical code. FYI, about a dozen years ago I comfortably used GMail on a 450 MHz PowerPC with 512 MiB of RAM. The javascript ran without a JIT, completely interpreted. It all ran just fine. Now here I am, on a multi-GHz multi-core box with gigabytes of RAM and a JIT, and I have to keep GMail in HTML-only mode. I simply can't run the javascript and still operate my computer. Mail is piling up because I can no longer select lots of email for deletion; it isn't practical to click every single item.