There is a floor where browsing the web is _painful_, and the pi is definitely in that category on any site that isn't hackernews levels of javascript. I challenge you to give amazon or ebay a try on it, or just spend a bit of time on youtube. Things you take for granted, like being able to run videos full screen won't happen on the pi if your monitor is HD or better.
We have an absolutely terrible bloat problem on the web. Unfortunately, using a slow PC on our end won't solve it. If we could force web devs to work on raspberry pis or old atom netbooks, the world would be a better place.
That's what I did, basically. I forced myself to work on low end machines because there might be a chance my website system also runs in a browser on a low end machine. My website with this blogpost is holding up perfectly fine by the way, even with all HN visitors, peaking at almost 2 visits each second for some hours. Also credits to my webhost!
It is funny to think of the hoops I jumped through to get things working nicely on an old Atom processor. My Makefiles were so good, everything was tracked compilation only happened when necessary...
Yeah, this is basically what I mean. Personally, I think the performance of SBC boards with Celeron N5105 is my baseline for "acceptable" performance for a desktop. Anything slower I will deliberately avoid due to the jank and inconvenience factor.
