[sha90]

> I stop counting the 5+ years old laptops that have to be upgraded,

5+ years ago is that LOOOOOONG time that OP was talking about. It's also unfair to compare technical capabilities of old hardware for many reasons. I think the point was that, new hardware, _while its new_, is becoming more and more capable. Any new laptop today, even budget ones, can handle YouTube videos in HD. The problem is that HD today won't be the same HD that exists in 5 years (i.e., 4k), and it's sensible that a budget laptop today will struggle with the 8k technology that comes out 5 years from now. This is an old problem (pun intended) and should not be surprising.

> Because personally, I keep having performance problems on all laptops I have.

Selection bias. Programmers who compile code, run VMs or containers, and process tons of data, are not the average consumer laptop use case and have much stricter requirements. Many people are sitting in Facebook, YouTube, Gmail, or Google Docs for most of their day-- and likely inside of Chrome.

Where are the "Chrome is Flash for the desktop" posts?

The idea that Electron is any different of a user experience for the vast majority of users seems skewed to developer usage, to me.

[overgard]

I don't know, 5+ years isn't that old anymore for a computer. Like, 5 years ago I was running... a core i7 with 4GB of ram. And now I'm running... a core i7 with 16GB of ram. The only things in computers that have really gotten significantly faster are SSDs and GPUs

[user5994461]

I meant 1080p when I said full HD.

It takes a surprising amount of power to decode. The cheap CPU from netbooks have been struggling for a decade, especially in battery power saving mode.

Lately, they get hardware acceleration just for that. Special CPU instructions and drivers just to achieve that decently.

[voltagex_]

For Youtube in particular, they're sending VP9+opus where the browser supports it, without considering hardware acceleration. The rather anaemic Atom chips might have H264 decoding on-chip, but only Kabylake has VP9.

[shwouchk]

'Where are the "Chrome is Flash for the desktop" posts?'

Ehhh, you're in one, I think?