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Ask HN: Is it just me or is mobile web browsing awful?

97 points by g4zj ↗ HN
I've got an iPhone X. It's not the latest and greatest, but still runs fine and does basically everything I need it to do.

However, it seems like any time I need to visit an actual web site from my phone, the entire experience is just terrible. Nearly every web site fills the screen with resource-intensive ads, enormous newsletter sign up dialogs with tiny close buttons, and of course, the obligatory cookie notice.

I don't want to have an app for every single business I visit or service I subscribe to, but I also do what I can to avoid visiting their horrid web pages.

How do you tackle this? Or am I just making a big deal over nothing?

108 comments

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markx2
I use nextdns.io on my iphone for adblocking and it works well. Give it a go?
brucethemoose2
The web is nigh unusable without an ad/element blocking browser. And its a security risk too.
pacifika
Firefox Focus comes with a good allround zero config content blocker that works in mobile Safari.

The issue also is that often when using the back button the page reloads ( I suspect due to memory issues on my iPhone 11) and I lose track of my reading position.

jmondi
As far as I can tell, Firefox Focus has no tab support, which means it is a non-starter. How can you use it as a browser if it has no tabbing?
ChrisLTD
The original poster is saying you should enable the Firefox Focus content blockers in Mobile Safari in Settings > Safari > Extensions.
jmondi
TIL thanks for explaining
3836293648
Lacking tabs is Focus's entire value proposition
toddmorey
Half the time I lose my reading position as the page reflows as more and more ads and widgets load. I've trained myself to hit the reader view button as quickly as possible.
fodkodrasz
It is terrible indeed. I'm just starting to not browse the net anymore, if possible.

I start to not care for the news, someone I know will tell me the stuff I need anyway.

I started buying paper books, and reading those.

ChrisLTD
It is indeed terrible. Between GDPR banners, modals asking you to subscribe or pay before you've read a single word of a site, and ads every other paragraph, the "content" web on mobile is in a bad state.

It's as bad on desktop, but ads, modals, and banners take up less of the available screen real estate, so perceptually it seems less annoying.

great_cormorant
This is something that Android would ostensibly do better at. You're able to get browsers with full ad-blocking capabilities there.

I've had luck with Orion (notably on YouTube videos) on iOS, though. DNS and other browsers might help, too.

oktoberpaard
AdGuard fits the bill for me in Safari. It includes blocking lists that you can enable and the paid version includes an optional extension that can execute more complex blocking rules where needed. YouTube ads are non-existent for me. The blocking lists also work in the standard in-app browser that most apps use.
greybox
Yes. I tackle this by doing most of my browsing on a desktop or laptop, where I have proper ad-blockers installed.
gdedhitchhiker
This raises a good point that you have to use these apps for a good exp. Their apps usually do good caching, preloading and good display. Now in a browser you have some more controls over cookies and things. The apps can get around that more.
oktoberpaard
Note that Safari has native support for content blockers (or what most people call adblockers). I use AdGuard on my iPhone and it works great. The blocking is done by Safari, the app just tells Safari what rules to use. The paid version of AdGuard includes an optional extension that can execute more complex blocking rules, but the free version works very well in almost all cases. There are other apps available as well.
eru
Firefox on Android also has ad blockers, eg ublock origin.
otterlysrs
What does that have to do with an iPhone X?
villis
Presumably it's to point out that iPhone users chose their device unwisely, compared to the broader range of choice available on Android.

I personally use Firefox with uBlock on Android for many hours per day, and would never choose Apple because of their 'my way or the highway' attitude to app usage.

On Android I can even build and install an APK if need be, with no extra hassle. Those held captive by Apple just have to take what they're given.

eru
No, I was merely giving some context. If people want to use an Apple device, I won't judge them. Especially if they can enable adblockers there now, too.
eru
They are both mobile devices, and readers of these comments might have devices of either kind. (Or both or neither, or something else.)
postalrat
Create demand from users for a choice of browser on ios.
oktoberpaard
uBlock Origin is great, it's the one I use wherever I can, together with Firefox. On iOS I like the AdGuard + Safari combination, though, and the blocking lists also work in most in-app browsers.
kyriakos
And if you really want chromium based engine, you can use kiwi browser which supports chrome extensions including ublock origin and even allows you to use dev tools.
fodkodrasz
AdGuard on safari makes some pages non-reponsive by blocking cookie consent popups, but keeping scrolling disabled for me. I need to disable blocking, jump the I Do Not Consent hoops, and re-enable it. (using the free edition, this did not convince me that i should pay for it, as I guess this is because of some safari limitation. Maybe I'm wrong?
oktoberpaard
I'm not using lists that disable cookie banners, exactly for that reason.
Saris
Yeah it's fairly limited on iOS due to browser restrictions. On Android with Firefox and ublock I use the element zapper to remove whatever is blocking the page.
numbsafari
I use Wipr on iOS and Mac OS. It works amazingly well.
byyll
do you consider ads content?
pornel
Blockers on iOS are a weaksauce. I still sometimes get malvertising ads in Safari, such as an alert("You have a virus! Call Microsoft on 0xxxxx"). I've never seen that on desktop with Firefox + uBlock Origin.
d3w4s9
I use adguard on my phone, so ads and tracking practically don't exist. I turn on the reading mode if I want to focus on the content instead of being consistently blocked by ads (or in my case, the space previously occupied by ads). I have adblock in my mobile browser as an additional step. And often I send longer pages to pocket and read them later on kindle.

So it is awful, but if you are willing to spend some time you can still make it usable.

(Hope Google's outrageous "DRM for web" idea never gets traction.)

thrownaway561
Install brave that has adblocking built into it. quit using safari.
jl6
This is why I always come to the HN comments first before clicking on any link to a domain I don’t recognize. I want an indication that the content is worth running the mobile usability gauntlet.
hffcvh
I have vision problems so I have just stopped using my phone browser, cause I can see better and type better while using the laptop browser.
Enginerrrd
Yeah, in general, I find anything"mobile optimized" is TERRIBLE. I much prefer the desktop site where I can parse the page fully and zoom to where I want to go.

Speaking of. There is almost nothing that infuriates me more than some web developer overriding the behavior of zoom. Not cool.

jauntywundrkind
Kiwi Browser supports WebExtensions. The 100% boring normal expected life-improving extensions like uBlock Origin for ads, Consent-o-matic for GDPR cookie setting, Dark Reader for dark-mode, and Form Vault for forms auto saving them make the web a much nicer place.

User agency rocks. Malleability ought to be the web's killer feature, is the open possibilities that apps will never have anything to offer or compete on. Cross-cutting software that improves every site or app we visit, in a consistent way: it's divine.

And mobile seems like the most constrained common form factor, which in my view amplifies the need to be able to adjust. But perversely the best & most important ability, the ability to adapt, is not available on common browsers like Chrome Mobile. And Firefox only semi-recently started re-allowing arbitrary extensions on mobile.

Fire-Dragon-DoL
Kiwi browser doesn't guarantee to be updated in time when cves are released (or at all), which sounds really scary
bhawks
The web works better on Android.

At Google some PMs used to lament that Android users spend more time in the browser than in apps versus iPhone. In my experience using browsers on Android are much better than on iPhone and not everything really wants to be an app.

Id point the finger at Google actually allowing different web browser apps (Safari drives every browser on iPhone and lags in many areas) and just natural competition. (If ads really bothers you an ad blocker is an install away).

My only complaint really being cookie banners but they suck the fun out of desktop web too.

appplication
I would actually suggest there may be a flip side of this. Android apps tend to feel more clunky than their iPhone counterparts, and the web is universally familiar. But it is possible both can be true at once.
bko
I think iOS apps are more heavily monetized because of the high fees. So maybe those are higher quality as that's where the money and paying users are. I wrote a few free iOS apps and I had to pull them because I just don't want to pay $100 a year for something I don't make any money off. Discoverability is terrible for both platforms, but I had better luck finding good free apps on android
danudey
Free, or free but ad-supported?
a1o
There are better FOSS apps on Android thanks to F-Droid and other efforts. Plus it's not that hard to roll something in a pipeline of an open source project that builds an Android app and have maintainers for it.

iPhone Apps require specific hardware and tools to make and maintain, and can't easily be built on an automatic pipeline. So all the work has to be by dedicated people using manual process.

Larrikin
Which apps specifically? As an Android dev that prefers an iPad for their tablet. There's been no discernable difference to me in native apps.

It only gets laggy and slow when the app is obviously some poorly put together react native, Xamarin app, or some other non native app. You can tell usually because they just kept the exact same design from their iPhone app. You have to put a lot more work into those kind of apps to make them not run like garbage.

vhcr
You can block cookie banners with ad blockers too.
musha68k
I want to believe this / hate on Apple as another iPhone X user with very slow web performance.

I would wager it’s not Safari mobile though just your standard website got way more resource hungry due to SPA proliferation etc.

TL;DR hard to verify your claim as Safari is the only allowed browser engine on iOS.

If somebody had a jailbroken/dev phone that would eg allow compile and install of Firefox then we could actually know.. I’m very skeptical it’s down to the browser though. Not sure if typical benchmarks are telling as hardware always different. Again “badly optimized” websites and 6+ years old hardware; albeit should be fast enough…

jwells89
It’s not a perfect rule, but the areas in which WebKit lags behind Blink tend to be in newer standards, not longstanding central pillars of web apps. As far as speed goes, my personal findings have been that WebKit and Blink are neck and neck assuming one has adblockers installed (which Safari on iOS supports).

When there are speed differences, it’s often because the app in question was only ever tested against Chrome and/or makes use of Blink specific quirks (as YouTube did/does). I’ve also seen some talk about over aggressive polyfills gunking things up under non-Blink browsers.

clubm8
> The web works better on Android.

Does "the web" work better, or the Google ecosystem?

One reason I don't want to move from iOS is their embedding of their stuff into the OS, which in turn beams my queries etc through GOOG.

But it's been a long time (multiple years) since I messed around with an Android tablet.

(Don't have the money to take risks rn, though ironically the next laptop will probably be anything but a macbook -- touchbar is terrible, heart my f keys)

utucuro
Late is better than never, right? I'm someone who only uses only these google service: maps, the play store and sometimes, rarely, google books I don't use google search, mail, drive or any other services, I have every single kind of history off and I use Firefox exclusively, on desktop as on Android. I must say, I do encounter badly designed mobile sites with this setup, but it is trivial to toggle desktop mode and then the problem is gone. It helps that I have a folding device, so I can always use a larger screen when needed.
ceejayoz
Every time I leave the house I realize how much my Pihole blocks. At some point I should put it online so I can use it for DNS everywhere.
bragr
At least on Android, Brave handles the ads, pop ups, cookie notices, etc very well for me.
wilkystyle
I personally have had great success with the following for Safari:

- 1Blocker as a general content blocker (as of this comment, it still blocks ads on YouTube videos as well!)

- Hush to remove cookie notices. I never see them anymore.

- For select sites that still insist on annoying pop-ups or aggressively hostile content layout, I tell safari to use reader mode by default. I do this for any substack sites I visit, for example, because of the ugly fonts, poor contrast, and obnoxious gradual fading of a pop-over asking you to subscribe every time you go to a page.

DamnInteresting
It would be nice if iOS Safari added support for the same browser extensions that are available on desktop browsers. Why have they not? Probably something about CPU usage and battery life, but boy-howdy the web is a shitshow without ad blockers, privacy enhancers, etc.
tiltowait
Safari's solution is content blockers. Part of the value proposition is they have less opportunity to spy on you than traditional extensions, because they can't actually read any page content.

The best one I've found is Wipr. It's almost as good as uBlock Origin. It seems there's a trade-off in approaches.

hansc
I use nextDNS to block all ads on my iPhone X, works like a charm
albert_e
Agreed.

the relentless nagging by some sites to install the mobile apps needs to die.

Just like the other popular post today lamenting the terrible state of scrollbars and other UI elements that has degraded the desktop UX in recent years....

Even the attention to mobile web experience seems to have degraded.

There was huge focus on optimizing the very limited bandwidth and resources on mobiles... there was WAP and XML ...people atleast tried. Now a 2 year old phone that is effectively a supercomputer struggles to load simple list pages and blogs.

random_
> the relentless nagging by some sites to install the mobile apps needs to die.

It seems all about the hope that you can keep the user engaged long terms. I don't blame them, competition for user attention is brutal in the age of the SEO content farms, oligopoly of social networks and the "Tyranny of the Marginal User" as posted here a few days ago.

But probably way less effective now that most users seem overwhelmed by so many push notifications and instinctively learned to mass ignore or dismiss them (myself included, just randomly noticed that background habit a while ago). And then we end-up with piles of installed unused apps just like lost websites in the browser history.

albert_e
And just to add -- even desktop websites these days nag people to install desktop apps instead of using the browser (Zoom, Slack)
artimaeis
Everyone's talking about content blocking software, which is probably how most of us tackle this to be fair.

But in response to your title question, yes! Not just mobile, IMO, but it's usually worse there. Web site experiences are generally terrible these days.

I wish we hadn't come to the point where we _need_ content blocking to browse the web sanely. I constantly feel like I'm using sites where the people deciding the user experience are not themselves users of the site. Or if they are, they just don't care about usability over bottom line and A/B metric testing results.

gustavus
I too find the web unusuable on mobile without FF mobile with ublock origin. Hey maybe Mozilla could focus on that rather than "reclaiming our online digital creative spaces"