Think of the 90s, when the web was first getting going. The joke was the WWW stood for World Wide Wait. Everything took forever to load. Pages of simple text could still take a second or two to transfer over the network. In today’s high speed network such slow links would be hard to use.
And yet, a lot of pages seem to take a long time to load. Pages I have to use. To harp again on my insurance: on Thursday, I went to my optometrist.
When I was checking out they asked me for my insurance card. They could bill directly. Great! I opened their page on my 5G phone. I proceeded to wait for the log in screen to appear before I could login. I waited for the menu to appear before I could click on documents. I waited for the insurance card to appear.
I know of the technical reasons for the slowness. They built the website on top of SalesForce. SalesForce like NetSuite (a former employer of mine) has a customization system. The customization allows their customers (my benefit provider) to script what a person can do.
Links to their customizations: https://www.salesforce.com/ca/products/platform/app-dev/digital-experiences/ https://help.salesforce.com/s/articleView?id=sf.apps_overview.htm&type=5
The scripting provides a level of indirection which slows the whole thing to a crawl. My dream is connecting the flow between steps in a customization system and transpiling it into an efficient system. Save CPU, power, and everybody’s time.