Software is also limited by the laws of physics, which is the actual hardware (silicon) it’s running on. Things like CPU clock speed, IPC, memory latency and th

Software is also limited by the laws of physics, which is the actual hardware (silicon) it’s running on. Things like CPU clock speed, IPC, memory latency and throughput are all constrained by things like the speed of light, capacitor physics, current status of silicon technology and manufacturing, etc. So when a web app performs sluggish on commodity devices, it’s because the devs haven’t put thought into the actual physical constraints of CPU and memory. It’s just plain bad engineering. (You might say that the whole browser DOM/JS model is at fault, but then that’s bad engineering for the Web spec designers. To be fair though, things like the DOM and JS were invented about 3 decades ago at the time when computer performance was increasing so fast that people really didn’t think about these constraints seriously. Nowadays things are different, and these initial design decisions are biting us…)