The Performance Inequality Gap, 2026

Have we finally rounded the corner? A look at the device and network landscape. The Budget, 2026 Edition Let's cut to the chase, shall we? Updated network test parameters for 2026 are: 9 Mbps downlink 3 mbps uplink 100 millisecond RTT Regarding devices, my updated recommendations are the Samsung Galaxy A24 4G (or equivalent) and the HP 14. The goal of these recommendations is to emulate a 75th percentile user experience, meaning a full quarter of devices and networks will perform worse than this baseline. Plugging these parameters into the updated budget calculator, we can derive critical-path resource thresholds for three and five second page load targets. Per usual, we consider pages built in two styles: JS-light, where only 15% of critical-path bytes are JavaScript, and JS-heavy, comprised of 50% JavaScript: Time JS-light (MiB) JS-heavy Total JS Other Total JS Other 3 sec 2.0 0.3 1.7 1.2 0.62 0.62 5 sec 3.7 0.57 3.2 2.3 1.15 1.15 Note: Budgets account for two TLS connections. Many sites initiate more early connections, reducing time available to download resources. Using four connections cuts the three-second budget by 350 KiB, to 1.5 MiB / 935 KiB. The five-second budget loses nearly half a megabyte, dropping to 3.2 / 1.9 MiB. It pays to adopt H/2 or H/3 and consolidate connections. These budgets are extremely generous. Even the target of three seconds is lavish; most sites should be able to put up interactive content much sooner for nearly all users. Meanwhile, sites are ballooning. The median mobile page is now 2.6 MiB, blowing past the size of DOOM (2.48 MiB) in April. The 75th percentile site is now larger than two copies of DOOM. P90+ sites are more than 4.5x larger, and sizes at each point have doubled over the past decade. Put another way, the median mobile page is now 70 times larger than the total storage of the computer that landed men on the moon. Median page weights are more than 2.5x larger for mobile sites than a decade ago, and sites at the 75th percentile are now 4x their 2015 weight. An outsized contributor to this bloat comes from growth in JavaScript. Mobile JavaScript payloads have more than doubled since 2015, reaching 680 KiB and 1.3 MiB at P50 and P75 (respectively). This compositional shift exacerbates latent inequality and hurts businesses trying to grow. When JavaScript grows as a proportion of critical-path resources, the impact of higher CPU cost per byte reduces budgets. This coffin corner effect explains why image and CSS-heavy experiences perform better byte-for-byte than sites built with the failed tools of frontend's lost decade. Indeed, the latest CrUX data shows not even half of origins have passing Core Web Vitals scores for mobile users. More than 40% of sites still perform poorly for desktop users, and progress in both cohorts is plateauing: This is a technical and business challenge, but also an ethical crisis. Anyone who cares to look can see the tragic consequences for those who most need the help technology can offer. Meanwhile, the lies, half-truths, and excuses made by frontend's influencer class are in defence of these approaches are, if anything, getting worse. Through no action of their own, frontend developers have been blessed with more compute and bandwidth every year. Instead of converting that bounty into delightful experiences and positive business results, the dominant culture of frontend has leant into self-aggrandising narratives that venerate failure as success. The result is a web that increasingly punishes the poor for their bad luck while paying developers huge salaries to deliver business-undermining results. Nobody comes to work wanting to do a bad job, but low-quality results are now the norm. This is a classic case of under-priced externalities created by induced demand from developers and PMs living in a privilege bubble. The interactive budget calculator has been updated and revised for 2026, allowing you to see the impact of networks, devices, connections, and JavaScript on site performance. Embedded in this year's estimates is hopeful news about the trajectory of devices and networks. Compared with early 2024's estimates, we're seeing budget growth of 600+KiB for three seconds, and a full megabyte of extra headroom at five seconds.1 While this is not enough to overcome continued growth in payloads, budgets are now an order of magnitude more generous than those first sketched in 2017. It has never been easier to deliver pages quickly, but we are not collectively hitting the mark. To get back to a healthy, competitive web, developers will need to apply considerably more restraint. If past is prologue, moderation is unlikely to arise organically. It's also unhelpful to conceive of ecosystem-level failures as personal failings. Yes, today's frontend culture is broken, but we should not expect better while incentives remain misaligned. Browsers, search engines, and developer tools will need to provide stronger nudges, steering users away from bloated sites where possible, and communicating the problem to decision-makers. This will be unpopular, but it is necessary for the web to thrive. ContentsThe Budget, 2026 EditionRecommended Test Devices and SettingsThe Big Story Is Still Low-End AndroidThe LandscapeMobileDesktopNetworksLooking ForwardContent TrendsAre SPAs Working?Analysis and Conclusions Recommended Test Devices and Settings This series has continually stressed that today's P75 device is yesterday's mid-market Android, and that trend continues. The explosive smartphone market growth of the mid 2010s is squarely in the rear-view mirror, and so historical Average Selling Prices (ASPs) and replacement dynamics now dominate any discussion of fleet performance. Hardware upgrade timelines are elongating. Previous estimates of 18 months for replacement on average is now too rosy, with the median smartphone now living longer than two years. P75 devices may be nearly 3 years old, and TechInsights estimates a 23.7% annual replacement rate. With all of this in mind, we update our target test device to the Samsung Galaxy A24 4G, a mid-2023 release featuring an SoC fabbed on a 6 nm process; a notable improvement over previous benchmark devices. Readers of this blog are unlikely to have used a phone as slow as the A24 in at least a decade. The A24 sold for less than the global Average Selling Price for smartphones at launch ($250 vs. $353). Because that specific model may be hard to acquire for testing, anything based on the MediaTek Helio G99 or Samsung Exynos 1330 will do; e.g.: Samsung Galaxy A16 4G Samsung Galaxy A07 4G Xiaomi Redmi Note 13 Pro 4G Teams that are serious about performance should track the low-end cohort instead, sticking with previously acquired Samsung Galaxy A51's, or any late-model device from the Moto E range.2 For link-accurate network throttling, I recommend spending $3 for Throttly for Android. It supports custom network profiles, allowing you to straightforwardly emulate a 9/3/100 network. DevTools throttling will always be inaccurate, and this is the best low-effort way to correctly condition links on your primary test device. Desktops are not currently the limiting factor in the ecosystem, but it's still helpful to have physical test devices. Do not spend more than $250 (new) on a low-end test laptop. It should have a Celeron processor, eMMC storage, and run Windows. The last point is not an effort to sell more licences, but rather to represent the nasty effects of defender, NTFS, and parasitic background services on system performance. Something like the HP 14 dq3500nr. Behold, the HP 14! A Celeron N4500 laptop, sporting a 4-core chip first released in 2021. This CPU packs less than a quarter the cache of a late-model iPhone. Desktop network throttling remains fraught, and the best solutions are still those from Pat Meenan's 2016 article announcing winShaper. The Big Story Is Still Low-End Android What we see in our recommended test setups is an echo of the greatest influence of the past decade on smartphone performance: the spread of slow, ever-cheaper Androids with ageing chipsets, riding the cost curve downward, year-on-year. The explosive growth of this segment drove nearly all market growth between 2011 and 2017. Now that smartphones have reached global saturation, flat sales volumes mirror the long-term trends in desktop device ownership: At no point in the past dozen years has iOS accounted for more than 20% of new-device shipments. Quarterly fluctuations have pushed that number as high as 25% when new models are released, but the effect never lasts. Most phones — indeed, most computers — are 24+ month old Androids. This is the result of a price segmented market: a preponderance of smartphones sold for more than $600USD (new, unlocked) are iPhones, and the overwhelming majority of devices sold for less than that are slow Androids. The “i” in “iPhone” stands for “inequality.” Global ASPs show the low-end isn't just alive-and-well, it's many multiples of high-end device volume. To maintain a global ASP near $370, an outsized number of cheaper Androids must be sold for every $1K (average) iOS device. The Landscape To understand how the payload budget estimate is derived, we need to peer deeper into the device and network situation. Despite huge, unpredictable shocks in the market (positive: Reliance Jio; negative: a pandemic), the market trends this series tracks have allowed us to forecast accurately. 75th+ percentile users are almost always on older devices, meaning we don't need to divine what will happen, just remember the recent past. Mobile The properties of today's mobile devices define how our sites run in practice. From the continued prevalence of 4G radios, to the shocking gaps in CPU performance, the reality of the modern web is best experienced through real devices. The next best way to understand it is through data. Per usual, single and multicore CPU performance charts track four market segments: