Yes, and it gets even worse if it's not the browser's disk cache, but the browser's RAM cache paged by the kernel to the swap.
Paging out RAM is fast, you just write pages to the disk in chunks that are contiguous on the disk. But the contiguous disk chunks don't correspond to contiguous virtual addresses, and when reading them back in, the order is just however the application chooses to access the pages, so it's quite random and hard to predict. And you can only buffer writes, not reads - you have to block reads until you get the data.
25 years ago you might have 4MB of swap, at 4KB page size that's 1000 pages, or 1000 potential individual points you may have to seek to.
Today 4GB of swap is sort of a minimum size that's not entirely useless, and that's 1 million pages, or 1 million potential seek points.
So IMHO putting swap on hard disks with 5-10 ms seek latency was very useful back in the day, but is pretty much obsolete now - if you need swap put it on flash based storage.
Paging out RAM is fast, you just write pages to the disk in chunks that are contiguous on the disk. But the contiguous disk chunks don't correspond to contiguous virtual addresses, and when reading them back in, the order is just however the application chooses to access the pages, so it's quite random and hard to predict. And you can only buffer writes, not reads - you have to block reads until you get the data.
25 years ago you might have 4MB of swap, at 4KB page size that's 1000 pages, or 1000 potential individual points you may have to seek to.
Today 4GB of swap is sort of a minimum size that's not entirely useless, and that's 1 million pages, or 1 million potential seek points.
So IMHO putting swap on hard disks with 5-10 ms seek latency was very useful back in the day, but is pretty much obsolete now - if you need swap put it on flash based storage.