"Plain HTML" gmail vs. any other version. It's way faster to navigate.

Remember when AJAX was supposed to make pages faster? LOL. Of course, back then we were just sending HTML to be injected, not JSON that has to be processed by 50+ Javascript functions before finally becoming HTML (or, some DOM entities, anyway).

> "Plain HTML" gmail vs. any other version. It's way faster to navigate.

And offers far less features. Attaching a file to an email takes ages without drag and drop, this alone is worth waiting few more milliseconds to most people (Gmail loads in less than 2 seconds on my crappy hotel wifi)

It is not milliseconds on older devices and network is not always the bottleneck

Most of the time you read e-mails, not write them.

When you write e-mails, most of the time you don't need multiple attachments. The first attachment is reasonably fast to add.

Bear in mind that serving Wikipedia pages (static text documents) is much simpler that AirBnB listings (dynamic image heavy content).

It is possible to create a faster AirBnB by changing some of the underlying constrained imposed on the system (eg by accepting to serve cached, stale, listings; or by lowering the amount of telemetry) but apparently Airbnb management does not think the tradeoff is worth it.

Of course you are entitled to think that these decision from Airbnb are wrong and that they are hurting their sales. But you know the saying: « The least you know about a problem, the more convinced you are that you have the right answer »

Wikipedia - fancy html over wire (for example the searchbox)

AirBnB - client side spa.

the kind of page you like is the fancy html over wire kind