I remember distinctly that the Verge was the first website I hated using on my phone. (As in, yes there are awful websites, but whatever, move on. As I was actually trying to read the Verge article.. i grew to hate it much more)
They have that awful floating box that is a constant overlay menu on their articles.. not to mention its completely black! in stark contrast to the rest of the page.
See, this is why I hate that word; it's used for absolutely everything, so I actually don't consider it to be incorrect when someone says "BBC's web app" and is referring to their website. I mean, I cringe a lot, but that's because of the word itself, not because of the meaning, which today seems to be "any kind of software".
Is it too conspiracy theory-ist to notice that these articles trashing mobile browsing and Safari in particular come from an ad-supported site on the eve of Apple adding adblock to Mobile Safari? This isn't my observation, though I can't recall where I read it.
There is a lot of terrible mobile websites out there, but some how I manage to get by. I simply refuse to have a mobile/native app for every website that is out there that I use. My mobile screen would be full to the brim with icons.
As it stands, I'm able to have a single "Contrib" folder, which contains mobile apps I can't do without (Skype, Feedly, BeerSmith 2, Untapped) on my iPhone with the apps I use mostly on the first screen. I now no longer have to scroll through multiple pages and multiple folders to find what app I want.
Why do I need a Medium.com mobile app when the mobile website works fine? It could be better, of course, but it works. Same with Facebook. I don't see the necessity to have a dedicated Facebook app on my phone when the mobile site gives me all I particularly want from Facebook.
All the sites I visit regularly work fine on mobile - I do wish they'd dedicate more time/resources/money on their mobile sites rather than their apps but I suppose the marketing department calls the shots. Got to take up room on my mobile phone screen!
Not a single mention of Flash! I've got a hunch Windows 10 may popularize it again... Still a more consistent runtime than all the stuff that "killed" it.
Flash wasn't the problem entirely. If they fixed the security issues we would be better off. The reason we hated flash is because of how advertisers used it.
Flash did solve the problem that the article complains about: consistency of experience and not having to develop your site / app to a pile of different runtimes.
But that's not a bug, but a feature for those in the business of selling admission to walled gardens. Same as it ever was.
My problem with flash is the same as with all plugins: scroll doesnt work, mouse-gesture dont work, shortcuts dont work, no control of content. Its like opening an enterly other program in browser without any integration.
Because the mobile web is putting the magnifying glass to the issues that have been lurking in sites. Most people here have computers and the bandwidth to download a large site in seconds, and needed RAM and drive space to have a large cache. When you get rid of that cache, and you slow down the connection, the Verge is a shitty site on the desktop too.
Because of the data their website serves, only about 3% of it is actual content. The rest is beacons, and trackers, and ads. It's precious coming from them.
> Let's be honest: mobile web is a far crappier experience than the desktop web
Some websites actually have a better 'mobile' site (either through a dedicated site or through responsive stylesheets) than their desktop site, explicitly because they minimise the amount of noise on the page.
I just recently made a comment about how many big sites are maintaining several frontends (when they can barely maintain one) with the mobile site being last behind mobile platforms in terms of priority.
there was a post, a link to TED show that referred to binary applets and how we suppose to think of browser being OS and having a safe environment in it to run small binary networked applets. Javascript was a great expriment and V8 kicks ass and probably best there has been for the browsers - yet model that browser is an app and not OS/Kernel with safe place to run privilged code - I think little will change. Because phones still have too little battery to waste and approach to mobile web that it is a browser and not Kernel or a part of the Kernel, little will change.
Apple has something - their stuff is binary. Android is all Java so there is that barrier beyond getting closer to hardware. Yes I know JVM is pretty fast and there is JIT. But it is not binary.
I stopped reading half way. The mobile Web is amazing. The verge is the kind of website that is broken both on desktop and mobile. And unfortunately there are too many websites like those.
As it happens, yesterday I had to stop a well-performing ad campaign on our site, because the banners were simply too bloated. For a good 10 seconds after the page loaded, their ads would be churning away, loading domain after domain, all to ultimately load a single 160x600px image.
In an attempt to demonstrate the problem to them, I made a list of all the domains that were being loaded by their ad code. Here they are:
And of course, those are only domains; many of those load multiple resources. Basically what they appear to be doing is "waterfalling" through a massive number of third party networks, looking for the most profitable ads. And it works well, if all you care about is revenue. The user experience is pretty terrible though. Even though the ads are asynchronous, so don't block the rest of the page, that amount of crap obviously slows things down in general, especially on mobile browsers. Plus, it just feels bloated when after the page is done loading, it sits there for 10 seconds with the spinner whirling and random ad domains spamming across the status bar.
It's really painful, because this kind of thing works; it outperforms adsense (which is extremely lightweight in comparison) by a significant margin. There's got to be a cost in user retention though, even if your only concern is the bottom line. (Let alone caring about user experience.)
I just loaded the page with the ad and made a list of all the domains I didn't recognize (or that I knew were ad domains) using the Chrome network tab. Then I removed the ad and checked that none of them were still present.
38 comments
[ 4.4 ms ] story [ 136 ms ] thread245 objects requested, 48 JavaScript files loaded, 9.8MB.
[0] http://product.voxmedia.com/2015/5/6/8561867/declaring-perfo...
Imaging if Microsoft won't let other developers write web browsers for windows.
Its the content that sux.
They have that awful floating box that is a constant overlay menu on their articles.. not to mention its completely black! in stark contrast to the rest of the page.
FTFFY
... yup
As it stands, I'm able to have a single "Contrib" folder, which contains mobile apps I can't do without (Skype, Feedly, BeerSmith 2, Untapped) on my iPhone with the apps I use mostly on the first screen. I now no longer have to scroll through multiple pages and multiple folders to find what app I want.
Why do I need a Medium.com mobile app when the mobile website works fine? It could be better, of course, but it works. Same with Facebook. I don't see the necessity to have a dedicated Facebook app on my phone when the mobile site gives me all I particularly want from Facebook.
All the sites I visit regularly work fine on mobile - I do wish they'd dedicate more time/resources/money on their mobile sites rather than their apps but I suppose the marketing department calls the shots. Got to take up room on my mobile phone screen!
But that's not a bug, but a feature for those in the business of selling admission to walled gardens. Same as it ever was.
Let's be honest: mobile web is a far crappier experience than the desktop web
Some websites actually have a better 'mobile' site (either through a dedicated site or through responsive stylesheets) than their desktop site, explicitly because they minimise the amount of noise on the page.
http://andreapaiola.name/magpie/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.thever...
Apple has something - their stuff is binary. Android is all Java so there is that barrier beyond getting closer to hardware. Yes I know JVM is pretty fast and there is JIT. But it is not binary.
IMHO
http://blog.lmorchard.com/2015/07/22/the-verge-web-sucks/
https://twitter.com/satefan/status/623226230301523968
In an attempt to demonstrate the problem to them, I made a list of all the domains that were being loaded by their ad code. Here they are:
That's ALL to ultimately load one ad.And of course, those are only domains; many of those load multiple resources. Basically what they appear to be doing is "waterfalling" through a massive number of third party networks, looking for the most profitable ads. And it works well, if all you care about is revenue. The user experience is pretty terrible though. Even though the ads are asynchronous, so don't block the rest of the page, that amount of crap obviously slows things down in general, especially on mobile browsers. Plus, it just feels bloated when after the page is done loading, it sits there for 10 seconds with the spinner whirling and random ad domains spamming across the status bar.
It's really painful, because this kind of thing works; it outperforms adsense (which is extremely lightweight in comparison) by a significant margin. There's got to be a cost in user retention though, even if your only concern is the bottom line. (Let alone caring about user experience.)