I think a lot of developers wanted mobile web performance to catch up with desktop and mobile native that we believed it would happen, and much faster than was ever really likely. We're used to things getting better quickly when it comes to technology.
Flagship phones improve things a little each year, but to quote William Gibson, the future is here, but unevenly distributed.
> We're used to things getting better quickly when it comes to technology.
It doesn't help that some influential people in the software industry, like Joel Spolsky, told us to bet on the hardware improving fast. See for example:
> a couple of companies, including Microsoft and Apple, noticed (just a little bit sooner than anyone else) that Moore’s Law meant that they shouldn’t think too hard about performance and memory usage… just build cool stuff, and wait for the hardware to catch up. Microsoft first shipped Excel for Windows when 80386s were too expensive to buy, but they were patient. Within a couple of years, the 80386SX came out, and anybody who could afford a $1500 clone could run Excel.
By contrast, he describes Lotus optimizing 1-2-3 so it could run in 640K of memory. Who would want to be today's equivalent of Lotus? So just pump out features and wait for the hardware to catch up, right?
Flagship phones improve things a little each year, but to quote William Gibson, the future is here, but unevenly distributed.