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The Verge's web sucks

blog.lmorchard.com

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101–110 of 137 posts

Re: The Verge's web sucks

#101

Post by lmorchard »

ised wrote: post #69

"263 HTTP requests" Seems reasonable. bwahahaha! Shall we discuss the number of DNS requests? And how many of those offsite servers are using something convoluted like Amazon for DNS? (which I find is more and more prevalent thanks to AWS) The blog author, e.g., is using Amazon for DNS. Alas, for each and every name, this adds more than a few lookups to what could be a 1-2 request process. Amazon uses multiple levels…

Actually, FWIW, I'm using pairNIC.com for DNS. I do host on Amazon S3, though.

Re: The Verge's web sucks

#102

Post by lmorchard »

forty wrote: post #19

I found it quite funny that this article ends like this https://imgur.com/SpEp9UF :)

Yeah, I'm a lazy bastard. My blog's all static files on Amazon S3 with no server side smarts, and I wanted comments. Disqus doesn't suck completely. There's a Google Analytics tag in there, as well as some Twitter code to embed a tweet.

Re: The Verge's web sucks

#103

Post by lmorchard »

justuk wrote: post #33

The great thing about advertising is it funds you no matter if you are famous or not. Bad thing is you have to live under their corporate censorship and all the baggage that goes with using third party sellers (privacy and inefficiency). To use some of the examples in the article, not everyone can rely on national license fees (BBC), corporate sponsorship (NPR), consistently making a loss (The Guardian), search engin…

FWIW, my post is not a rant against advertising in general. It's about doing it with such a large volume of code & third parties involved, leaning on my bandwidth & CPU to cover for a lack of coordination.

Toward the end of the post I say something like "what if we actually accepted the fact that ads are a way of funding the web at large" and mention some Mozilla efforts in that direction

Re: The Verge's web sucks

#104

Post by lmorchard »

EdiX wrote: post #79
omouse wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Still loads faster than The Verge ;)

It's The Verge's article that gets 15%, OP gets 63% (faster than The Verge, obviously).

Huh. Interesting that mine is so bad. The PageSpeed report is fair, though. I didn't optimize images, set expires headers, etc.

Weird that Amazon isn't serving things up gzip'd - oh, interesting, I have to gzip the stuff in my build script and deploy it compressed.

Re: The Verge's web sucks

#105

Post by lmorchard »

untog wrote: post #73
mr_sturd wrote: post #28

Nilay Patel has the audacity to say that the mobile web sucks [0]. No. It's just your website that sucks, mate. [0] - https://www.theverge.com/2015/7/20/9002721/the-mobile-web-su...

No, it isn't. The mobile web does suck, and I say this as someone who works making mobile web sites every day. While Nilay's article is a bit hit and miss, it still seems pretty undeniable to me that the mobile web experience is inferior to native apps.

Inferior in what ways, and for what purposes?

For the most part, I haven't seen a technical superiority between web & native for most of what folks want to do. It seems more a practical superiority because we haven't been allowed to / found a need to crap up the native experience quite as much.

App stores & in-app purchases go a lot way toward obviating the need for so much cruft. Too much JS framework cruft is a self-inflicted injury. These are addressable issues, not inherent to the web.

Re: The Verge's web sucks

#106

Post by lmorchard »

manigandham wrote: post #76
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…

This is complicated because of how ad networks work and all the layers involved. We have somewhat of a standard called RTB (real-time bidding) where an exchange will see each impression and run an auction in 100ms for each ad slot and then take the winning bid and render it on the page. That was easy and efficient when it was just an image. Now ad formats have become more "engaging" and require javascript tags to run…

Thanks for all these details! My rant was largely based on guessing what's going on with all the stuff.

Re: The Verge's web sucks

#107

Post by smackfu »

vvanders wrote: post #83
mdevere wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Temporarily disabled by default but they turn them on for certain articles. They claimed this was because comments had become too negative. It is possible they are genuinely just trying to protect the mental health of their staff who are usually the targets of more aggressive comments but somehow I doubt it.

It seemed to happen after they posted the SpaceX article(www.theverge.com/2015/6/29/8863121/spacex-falcon-9-rocket-explosioauses) that was poorly thought through. They got some criticism(but not abusive) feedback in the comments. They started deleting comments in that thread and it all went downhill from there once people realized posts were being removed. Kinda a shame, I liked Topolsky & Co but I don't visit it nea…

Topolsky has been gone from there for a year, so it's just Co.

Re: The Verge's web sucks

#108

Post by smackfu »

vinceyuan wrote: post #7

I did the same thing several days ago. But after 30 seconds, the web page did not finish loading. It has downloaded 7+ MB. I closed it.

Some of these pages never "finish" loading. They use a tracker script that pings a server every so often with your current position in the story, so they can get stats on who actually reads the articles vs. who follows a link and then bails out.

Re: The Verge's web sucks

#109

Post by Joeri »

untog wrote: post #73
mr_sturd wrote: post #28

Nilay Patel has the audacity to say that the mobile web sucks [0]. No. It's just your website that sucks, mate. [0] - https://www.theverge.com/2015/7/20/9002721/the-mobile-web-su...

No, it isn't. The mobile web does suck, and I say this as someone who works making mobile web sites every day. While Nilay's article is a bit hit and miss, it still seems pretty undeniable to me that the mobile web experience is inferior to native apps.

Yes, the mobile web is inferior, but the point is that websites have done the legwork to make it so. Facebook's instant articles are basically a web page where facebook forbids bloat. In fact, the publishers deliver it to facebook as html, and i suspect facebook renders it in a webview. So, why not just show the exact same content on their mobile web page, instead of something with ten times the bloat? The bloat has become gratuitous. Just look at facebook's page where they explain instant articles, itself a fine ironic demonstration of gratuitous bloat.

I don't think mobile safari can be blamed. When the iphone was first released, people thought safari on it was amazing. Today's safari is a much better browser, running on vastly superior hardware, but the browsing experience is inferior. Who else is to blame but the content providers?

Re: The Verge's web sucks

#110

Post by lmorchard »

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've seen folks give Apple a lot of credit for this, but they're not building an ad blocker.

They're offering the APIs that can be used by developers to build ad blocking extensions. Not much different than what you can do in Chrome & Firefox already. Same held-at-arms-length thing.

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