People like to forget that having 37 windows open with netscape was possible, but it would regularly crash and take all 37 windows with it. Also, all 37 tabs w

People like to forget that having 37 windows open with netscape was possible, but it would regularly crash and take all 37 windows with it. Also, all 37 tabs were likely displaying pages that looked like HN or lite.cnn.com Software isn't really that bloated, it's the content. In the 90s if you had a video on a website it was things like 320x240 at 15fps. If you had a jpeg it was probably 640x480, and there might have been one or two on a page. If I load https://flickr.com/ https://flickr.com/ it sends down a 2000x1333 background image that is almost 700K. On my dialup connection in the 90s that would have taken almost 5 minutes to load. The image likely takes 5MB of ram (or at least gpu memory?) to display. Looking at flickr snapshot from 2004, the entire page is 300K. https://web.archive.org/web/20040701020748/http://flickr.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20040701020748/http://flickr.com... Sure, some JS stuff is bloated, but you can remove all the JS in the world and it won't change the fact that images are 10 times the size that they used to be. The one thing that likely uses more resources is the per-tab sandboxing browsers do now.