It’s awful. Everything web-based is slower on my 4.5 ghz MacBook Pro than things were on my 300 MHz PII running Windows 98. Every web page causes MacOS to complain “Safari is using a lot of power.” I was hunting for a project management web app, and one ate up 10% of the CPU just sitting there doing nothing. This has gotten particularly bad with Microsoft, with Word and Outlook on the Mac, which just kill battery life. (I think they’re using more and more JS under the hood, and I hear Outlook is slated to be replaced with a web app.) Teams is a bloated pig.

The crazy thing is that all these web apps also do a fraction of the things that the native apps used to do. They’ve somehow managed to strip down all the features while making the apps slow and bloated. Watching Microsoft’s To-Do blog is comitragic. Elon Musk will be living on Mars before the Microsoft tools allow you to schedule todos by dragging them to the calendar like Outlook has done since what, 98? (You can drag a todo from the web sidebar to the calendar now—but it somehow doesn’t actually schedule the due or start date in the todo itself or even have any link back to the todo.) And I feel like that’s one thing that’s different now. I also complained that Word 97 was a slow bloated big compared to Word Perfect, etc. But back in the day there was feature bloat. Now, everything is both slow and and non-functional.

I have to assume that it’s a structural thing with the industry. Machine learning, big data, security, etc., has become the hot areas, so all the “A” teams have migrated over there. I hear Apple is having trouble even getting people to do kernel work on MacOS.