It’s 2009, I am sat in front of a dual core 2.6GHz machine. It contains a graphics card capable of throwing millions of polygons around the screen without breaking a sweat. The HDD is capable of some stupidly fast data transfer rate and my RAM is so large I could copy all my 8 and 16 bit software collection into it and still have room to boot Windows. Oh, I also have a 6Mb ADSL2+ connection which is capable of dragging data off the internet at 6-700K/sec (that’s kilobytes, not kilobits).

So why does Firefox take 30 seconds to grind itself into life? What’s it doing? Typing into the Awesomebar produces confusing pauses too. Surely it’s not that difficult to scan a list of previous URLs looking for likely matches.

It’s not just Firefox though. On my work PC IE8 takes forever to do anything at all. Clicking on the “new tab” button results in a frustrating two second constipated pause while it says “Connecting…”. Connecting to what? I’ve not typed in an address yet!

IE8 did like to tell me I’d just opened a new tab, in that irritating way Microsoft products do until I switched that off.

Chrome is a bit of an improvement, but since it has no plugin system I have to put up with adverts on my webpages (yes, I do run Privoxy, but it’s just not as good) and the odd braindead site saying “uhh you’re not running Internet Explorer, go away please”.

I won’t mention badly coded AJAX-driven sites that just … stop … for no reason at all because the background HTTP request has silently died and nobody thought to check for that. Google copes with this very well, Twitter seem largely clueless, and occasionally my own WordPress installation likes to get it wrong and double-post things or not post at all.

And what’s with the meaningless progress twirlers that spin around and around? Once upon a time we had a progress bar that’d fill up. Now it’s just a thing that spins until either the page loads with the CSS missing, or “That site failed to load. Here’s a meaningless page of gibberish about why, which if you read it all will tell you at the bottom to either try reloading the page, or to ask your system administrator for help. After you’ve gone and messed around with proxy and encryption settings for no reason at all”.

One day we’ll get information instantly and will wonder what all the fuss was about. Although then we’ll probably be complaining that it takes effort to read the stuff, and why can’t it just be injected directly into our brains as we sleep.