Chapter 5: Waiting for elements and network calls

I won't say I'm old, but I started browsing the internet in the late 90s. So yes, I'm old. Back then, you would sometimes have to wait over a minute to get a page loaded. You might be thinking, "So if you had 10 tabs open, that would be impossible to use." Well, browsers didn't have tabs! Downloading one single MP3 file could take you an hour.

In the early 2000s, the web got into the corporate world, and we started developing business apps using websites. But that was a decision from an IT department. Old terminal apps were hard to update and introduce new features, and desktop apps were hard to distribute. Web apps were the IT department's solution, leaving users with slow and non-user-friendly web apps.

Developers were trying to do their best with the tools they had back then. Pages were mostly generated on the server side using tools such as ASP 3.0 or PHP. AJAX was used for small tasks,...