Discourse uses too much memory on the client and crashes the browser.
As you said, someone shouldn't need latest gen hardware to use the WWW. I personally don't have a lot of control in what the predominate platforms are on the internet, but I have remarked to myself in my bunker that Discourse is a first world echo chamber because no-one else can run it.
Look at hacker news. It isn't pretty and it has lots of glaring usability problems that are trivial to fix, but it could literally run with Firefox 1.0 on a P3-500 just fine.
I love HN's design. It's the "Craig's List school of design" -- simple presentation of information with no distractions.
The WWW has been heading in a terrible direction (animation, over-saturated colors) over the past few years. People use too much JS and CSS3 because it's possible, not because it's a good idea.
Have you tried turning of JS on Discourse forums? It should render a minimal HTML page via the <noscript> elements. Maybe they should do feature detection -- if a browser isn't capable of running the application, turn off JS and serve the minimal HTML. If it works, you could open an issue in their Github repo or post on meta.discourse.org.
HN is no where close to Craig's List in terms of design. They are both minimal, fast and task driven, but Craig's is a work of art. HN is a roughshod hackers tool.
Frankly, it never occurred to me that Discourse could ever run w/o JS. Next time I am near my ipad, I'll definitely test it out. I'd use a combo of allow/deny. Remember when we used "gradual enhancement" ?
I think there should be a standard way for the client to request the low resource usage version of an app, the hack is say you are a phone or request the m.dot site, but it should just be in the accepts header.
As you said, someone shouldn't need latest gen hardware to use the WWW. I personally don't have a lot of control in what the predominate platforms are on the internet, but I have remarked to myself in my bunker that Discourse is a first world echo chamber because no-one else can run it.
Look at hacker news. It isn't pretty and it has lots of glaring usability problems that are trivial to fix, but it could literally run with Firefox 1.0 on a P3-500 just fine.