McDonalds actually seems to have learned to take latency seriously. When their touch screen ordering systems were first deployed, the delay between tapping on an item or button was quite noticeable. These days the systems respond nearly instantaneously. I'm very glad there are people inside such a large organization that pay attention to that aspect of usability.

Now if only every other website on the internet would learn that latency matters...

I would imagine it is intended so it loads quickly on mobile devices using slow data connections in crowded areas. I have noticed web pages taking a lot longer to load when I am in a city centre on a data connection. Its pretty cool and may even give a competitive edge if you can still be snappy in that situation when your competitiors arent.

It’s worrying, or perhaps just sad, that 766ms for an initial page load is considered especially noteworthy. Six thousand milliseconds is just awful.

BK's page is also completely unusable without JS. It's an "appsite", not a website.

McD's is readable with JS off, because the "meat" of the content is plain HTML. I also like how the other links here are to URLs of the form "/en/products/nnnn", which further reinforces the fact that the pages are server-side.

It's fast food, what do you expect. ;)

they gotta make sure you learn about those burgers as fast as possible.

Crazy fast but the the way all header text sizes change briefly flash between values every time you switch tabs would drive me nuts if I was responsible for this.

+1. not just that front page, click on any of the menu. Good prefetch and ttfb optimization there

Hungry people are impatient. Some have learned this and how to gain another small edge with it.