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The Verge's web sucks

blog.lmorchard.com

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Re: The Verge's web sucks

#21

Post by dvh »

o87dv wrote: post #18
dvh wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are plenty of readers, you just need to create the html to rss convertor for specific sites. My code is quite ugly so no. Also they often break when they make changes on website.

The converter is actually what I would really like to have. I hate parsing. And fixing it when it breaks. It doesn't matter if the code is ugly. You are trying to parse crappy websites after all. Consider sharing.

Well, I only have parsers for slovak news site, 3 parsers for lang-8 (homepage, lang match, footprints), couple for local real estate agents, nothing reusable for english speaking folks, only thing that you could use is probably twitter parser: http://pastebin.com/wpjZ6azZ I did it just recently and I use it to parse DAWN and New Horizont feeds.

Re: The Verge's web sucks

#22

Post by eitally »

josteink wrote: post #5

After reading this article, I decided to try reading the verge in a more "limited" browser which doesn't support endless Javascript and too may advanced features: Emacs built in web-browser, or "eww" (that's its name). It's sort of like Lynx or w3m, except you can click things and it shows actual images! You can see it here: http://imgur.com/FqJVB0U You know what? The site and all content loads instantly . It may not…

Hehe ... I had a similar experience but my solution was to just read it (as well as many other tech blogs) use feed readers. I almost never go to the actual website (The Verge, Mashable, Re/Code, RWW, Anandtech, Android Police, ...).

Re: The Verge's web sucks

#23

Post by Cthulhu_ »

psykovsky wrote: post #12
oliyoung wrote: post #2

These guys (ie Verge) are going to have a really really tough time when iOS9 lands https://developer.apple.com/library/prerelease/ios/releaseno...

You talk like Apple is doing something new and owns the market.

I haven't seen other mobile browsers support blocking 3rd party content yet. I think that's mainly because Google is the other major phone manufacturer, and their main source of income is that exact 3rd party content. Apple isn't burdened by that - they want to sell phones and keep them the best. Blocking 7 MB of JS that isn't the content the user wants is a good optimization.

Re: The Verge's web sucks

#24

Post by arm »

josteink wrote: post #5

After reading this article, I decided to try reading the verge in a more "limited" browser which doesn't support endless Javascript and too may advanced features: Emacs built in web-browser, or "eww" (that's its name). It's sort of like Lynx or w3m, except you can click things and it shows actual images! You can see it here: http://imgur.com/FqJVB0U You know what? The site and all content loads instantly . It may not…

That’s pretty cool. I’d love to try using a browser like this for a while, but to be honest, I’d probably feel too naked to be browsing the web with no tracking-blocking extensions. No JavaScript makes a huge difference of course, but I doubt that that is good enough to completely prevent all tracking methods advertisers use (I’m thinking of things like third-party elements on a page, although maybe most of those are also loaded through JavaScript).

Re: The Verge's web sucks

#26

Post by mcintyre1994 »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #23
psykovsky wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You talk like Apple is doing something new and owns the market.

I haven't seen other mobile browsers support blocking 3rd party content yet. I think that's mainly because Google is the other major phone manufacturer, and their main source of income is that exact 3rd party content. Apple isn't burdened by that - they want to sell phones and keep them the best. Blocking 7 MB of JS that isn't the content the user wants is a good optimization.

You're right about Google, but FWIW Firefox on Android fully supports extensions - including eg uBlock origin.

Re: The Verge's web sucks

#27

Post by sbarre »

thedz wrote: post #6
danboarder wrote: post #3

Wow. From the article, an example post on the Verge "downloaded 12MB - a little over 7MB in that is JavaScript" and a refresh of the page with things cached still downloaded 8MB again. And key here -- the article HTML content itself was 75k, the rest is ad network Javascript. (apparently over 20 different companies) I don't like tracking scripts either but why can't the ad networks get together and create a shared sc…

> I don't like tracking scripts either but why can't the ad networks get together and create a shared script instead of so many that seem to be redundant? I've asked that myself many times, and I mostly decided that part of the reason is at least partly related to why there were so many browser engines back in the day (Mozilla, IE, Webkit, Opera, etc). Each company thinks they can track something differently/better t…

Also, a lot of these products are part snake oil, so getting together to come up with shared tools would expose all that waste and redundancy and put half of them out of business..

Wait, that sounds great.

Re: The Verge's web sucks

#29

Post by tragic »

hyperion_ wrote: post #13
oliyoung wrote: post #2

These guys (ie Verge) are going to have a really really tough time when iOS9 lands https://developer.apple.com/library/prerelease/ios/releaseno...

I have a hard time seeing the majority of iOS users installing one, this is the same as with most things, if it's not the default, 95% of users won't make use of it. Is even the majority of users of desktop web browsers actually using adblockers yet? Adblock Plus on Firefox shows a bit short of 20 million users, while Adblock on Chrome says 'over 200 million downloads', whatever that means in number of users. These n…

You're probably right against the parent, but in the long term I would expect use of ad blockers to rise, simply because ads are getting observably more bloated and intrusive.

Elementary example: the likes of us will get requests from our tech-illiterate friends and relatives - "my internet is broken. It's really slow." And we will install ABP/ublock whatever.

This is, of course, assuming that there are no dramatic 'interruptions' - eg, browsers ceasing to support ABP-type extensions, the ads-versus-adblockers arms race moving decisively in the former's favour; etc.

I can't find any numbers on adblocker usage over time during the recent period - would be a good thing to look at - but here's the google trend, FWIW. https://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=ad%20blocker&cmpt=q&...

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