Somewhere between 2007 and 2014 we decided, collectively and without much ceremony, that the internet should be instantaneous. Pages should appear before our fingers leave the trackpad. Replies should arrive before we finished typing the question. Anything slower than perceptual zero became, by definition, broken.
I have built sites that load in 90 milliseconds. I have shaved 14 kilobytes off a hero image. I have, in moments I'm not proud of, performance-budgeted a site so aggressively that the team had to debate whether a single web-font was worth the cost. We won the argument. We removed the font. The site is faster now, and lonelier.
What we lost when we got instant.
The web of 2003 had a tempo. You clicked a link; a status bar filled; the page arrived. It arrived with a small ceremony — a moment of held breath, a moment in which you noticed that you'd asked for something. The page knew you'd waited for it. It tried, in its way, to be worth the wait.
The page knew you'd waited for it. It tried, in its way, to be worth the wait.
Instant pages have no such manners. They appear the way Snapchat does — half-prepared, mid-thought, already evaporating. They don't expect to be read so much as glanced at, like billboards on a highway. They optimise for a kind of attention nobody actually has.
The fastest site is the one that asked you for nothing — and gave you nothing back.
— Frank Chimero, in conversation, March 2025A slower web is a more honest one.
I'm not arguing for friction in the bad sense — please, don't make me wait for the bank's javascript to settle before I can pay rent. I'm arguing for ceremony. For pages that arrive deliberately. For animations that mean something. For type that takes a half-second to settle into the right weight, the way a real letter takes a half-second to fall out of the envelope.
When I look at the work I'm proudest of — the projects clients still email me about a decade later — it's never the fast one. It's the one that took an extra second to do something nobody asked it to do. A heading that re-rendered with intention. A transition that committed. A page that, before showing you its hand, took one quiet beat to think.
The internet doesn't owe us instantaneous. We owe the internet, the people on it, and ourselves something a little better than that.
- Read more on slowness as a design value
- The original 90s web ring index — still working, somehow
- A photo essay on the modems of Lisbon