BTW, another aspect of this is that with all the ads, lots of other web sites are being asked for page information. Those sites can be slow to respond or even unavailable for brief periods of time. Browsers don't like it when things they request are unavailable. They can misbehave badly. Google is so ubiquitous in ad service that when Google servers have a delay browsers can seem to hang. You will usually see a message at the bottom of the screen, "Waiting for a reply from Google" or something like that. Again, it's in Google's business interests to be very fast in response time but the web is not a precision instrument. Hiccups can happen anywhere along the path. Then it comes down to how does your operating system and browser and add-ons all handle such hiccups?
And since each of us have somewhat unique paths to our web destination and such problems can be transient and each of us get unique content that comes down more unique paths, each user experience can be quite different and even different based on time of day and even recent web activity.
It's a very different thing than each of us running MS Excel 2010 and comparing experiences. While there is some variability between users of an installed app, the code running is essentially the same.
Many versions ago it was possible to configure IE to block most ads. What a huge difference in performance and reliability that made. They removed most of that capability in newer versions because, after all, ads are what pay for the web. But when you use the web, consider how much of the content you get is what you asked for and how much is "extra" stuff. As a point of discussion say it is 50% extra stuff. Then half of the bandwidth on the web is unrequested "junk mail". That bandwidth use translates to real costs for the equipment to support it and time to transmit the data. If you have a broadband plan they are charging for amount of content delivered. If half of what is delivered is unasked for and you still have to pay for it ...
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