Some stuff feels faster to me, especially compute-heavy stuff like you mention (waiting forever for a Photoshop filter to complete while it chews up your RAM an

Some stuff feels faster to me, especially compute-heavy stuff like you mention (waiting forever for a Photoshop filter to complete while it chews up your RAM and starts swapping). But quite a few things feel slower, particularly anything where latency for normal, lightweight interactions is the most noticeable aspect. For example Gmail feels quite sluggish to me compared to what I used to use for years, Pegasus Mail, at least for basic operations like opening a mail, opening a reply window, etc. (Gmail probably does scale to large number of messages better, and its search is faster). Anything that involves serious text manipulation in a browser also feels just high-latency enough to be painful, at least on my connection; I spent much of today writing in writeLaTeX and the experience was somewhat frustrating. It's not unprecedented slowness, but a lot of things about webapps remind me of running remote X apps on an underpowered X terminal connected to a powerful server: compute-heavy stuff is generally handled nicely, but clicking on anything at all has a little bit of latency attached to it.