In Chrome 49, the Downloads page (Ctrl+J, chrome://downloads) defaults to a new Polymer-based Material Design UI. The HTML file alone weighs 2847 lines, but what's 2847 lines of code if it's being loaded from my SSD, right?
Well, Ctrl+J feels even more sluggish now than it did before. So I check Developer Tools: 57 ms till Finish for the old UI, 306 ms for the new one [1, 2].
Add to that the time that Chrome apparently needs to somehow prepare the Downloads tab, and we arrive at a perceived load time of around 800 ms. I find this more than irritating if I just want to quickly open that file that I have downloaded a minute ago.
A few years ago, I think the rule of thumb for web pages was that 100 ms are acceptable latency that users typically won't perceive as sluggish. Nowadays, we accept hundreds of milliseconds, often whole seconds, for trivial local UIs. Yes, yes, that button click animation is pretty sweet. But is it worth 300 ms of additional latency?
I'm disappointed in Chrome. Your mission used to be "speed, simplicity, and security." (It's still on chrome://help!) Nowadays, opening a new tab takes hundreds of milliseconds. Can't you at least somehow cache this not-so-exotic action so the browser at least feels responsive?
And I'm baffled about recent industry trends. On today's hardware, I could probably boot up Windows 2000 in 300 ms. What is my CPU even doing in these 300 ms while chrome://downloads is loading? Have we simply stopped caring about latency at all?
[1] http://i.imgur.com/kODF3FJ.png
[2] http://i.imgur.com/rVj4D1u.png
