Damn. I loved the basic HTML feature in Gmail when logging in on a slow-as-shit 3G connection, or I was behind several proxies and latency was an issue. More enshittification by Google.
It was pretty fun/interesting to see creative solutions like that to deal with very limited bandwidth in practice.
We'd pull email down over Inmarsat, but the geometry was such that the ship literally had to come to a different course and speed to keep a lock on the bird.
Physics matter sometimes.