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Disclaimer that years ago, I was impressed at how slick the TurboTax website was.

So I'm surprised they even still have a desktop version (...presumably not just some electron wrapper). And given how it works, I'd guess most of your data isn't staying local for much of this.

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Their website is pretty garbage IMO. Every single click is a spinner image for 1 second while the layout adjusts and fetches data. I’m not certain if this is a react or vue or whatever FE JavaScript thing but it’s extremely prevalent across the web and pretty much completely defeats the purpose of having a SPA design.

TT was/is old-style "slick", like at the time it put my bank to shame in terms of UI. It probably wasn't using a 'popular framework' and if it was, it wasn't a naive implementation. It also was/is optimized for desktop, while many financial corps now only care about mobile. So as of last April, it was still good enough for me.

Was it fast? No. Just fast enough. That's why I doubt the desktop app is really any different. They must have a bunch of API endpoints, and the 'slowness' is all on the backend.

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