The Verge's web sucks • Hacker News Board

Re: The Verge's web sucks

#131

Post by fanf2 » Sat, Jul 25, 2015, 8:13 AM UTC

otis_inf wrote: post #51

wiremine wrote: post #50

As a consultant, I only see web site producers making an effort to curb poor web practices when Google forces them to: Google's move to boost mobile-friendly design in the rankings has driven us a TON of responsive design work. I wonder if that is going to be what it takes to fix today's bloat problems: Google takes the hammer to sites that too much advertising cruft. Otherwise, I don't see business makers seeing muc…

> I wonder if that is going to be what it takes to fix today's bloat problems: Google takes the hammer to sites that too much advertising cruft. That could get interesting: Google, using the argument that all those ad-related scripts make things slow, ranking sites with a lot of them lower than sites which don't, and at the same time hitting their competitors hard: after all, Google makes money through ads, if their…

It would be amusing if this made Google downrank their own crappy sites that use stupid quantities of JS to render mostly plain text - blogger, groups, plus, etc. are all a shitshow of unnecessarily bad performance.

Re: The Verge's web sucks

#132

Post by tdkl » Sat, Jul 25, 2015, 8:33 AM UTC

josteink wrote: post #127

krstck wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference in page load times before and after implementing uBlock is staggering . Having to use a computer you don't own (or mobile) feels like traveling back to 1999 using 56k dial-up.

Firefox mobile supports extensions like ublock just fine. Use a browser which doesn't suck :) And if you're using an Iphone: you made the choice that apple should make all the choices for you. You've made your own bed. Sorry about that.

They already made that choice for iOS9.

Re: The Verge's web sucks

#133

Post by bithead » Sat, Jul 25, 2015, 4:03 PM UTC

insin wrote: post #31

> We keep things like Adblock Plus at arm's length for plausible deniability - but everyone I know uses it. I wish this had been included in the main body of this post, with some metrics; everyone you know uses it because it makes the web suck so much less. Loading The Verge's article in a Chrome incognito window: 19.6 MB transferred, finished in 41.9 s, huge ad covering the entire page above the developer console I…

I see a pattern. I may be revealing a bit too much about my longevity, but I've always hated two thing about 'reading' a magazine: the little subscription tear-offs that fall out littering every floor, and that you can't actually read and article without experiencing some form of ADD by flipping through pages of ads you don't care about to get to the next paragraph.

Sound familiar? I just described most web sites by recalling reading a 20th century vintage print magazine. That should sadden everyone. We have a triumph of human progress in not just the Internet, but the Web that rides above it. The promise is a more intelligent and enlightened interaction between content provider and content receiver, perhaps more like a conversation than the print-radio-TV one-way street. Instead, it's not really much different at all, except with more ads and popups.

Re: The Verge's web sucks

#134

Post by bithead » Sat, Jul 25, 2015, 4:06 PM UTC

hajile wrote: post #124

JustSomeNobody wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He blames mobile browsers for at least half the article (I had to stop reading). Sure, mobile browsers may not be great, but web sites these days seem to be written by people who just don't give a shit. Their hipster attitude is ruining people's experience.

Mobile browsers are fine. The problem is that the A9 processors from a generation ago (and current low-end phones) have similar processing power to an old Pentium 4 processor (with less bandwidth and RAM). Put the same website behind something running an A57 and watch those intolerable numbers become reasonably acceptable for a >3W processor. Don't blame the browser, blame ARM. Mobile processors are slow because Moor…

It's not a question of CPU power, it's shittycrap designed websites that push everything to the browser.

Re: The Verge's web sucks

#135

Post by giancarlostoro » Sun, Jul 26, 2015, 1:59 AM UTC

yellowapple wrote: post #126

giancarlostoro wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. I've wanted to write my own blog post about the things that suck about Mobile web, it's not the device or the software (typically), it's the way websites are designed (or not) for phones that sucks. You get advertisements that hijack all your screen real estate, open up the Android Market out of nowhere (why do they have this much priviledge? That shouldn't happen on the desktop without asking for permission…

> open up the Android Market out of nowhere (why do they have this much priviledge? That shouldn't happen on the desktop without asking for permission). This is based on how Android browsers handle URLs to the Play Store. Some browsers (like Firefox) don't do this automatically (at least for me); instead, they'll just present you with the web page version of the Play Store (as if you were on a desktop), but with an i…

> My "favorite" is when a site will throw a browser dialog asking to install the app version of their site.

Yes! If I wanted the app I wouldn't be on a browser!

Re: The Verge's web sucks

#136

Post by smaudet » Mon, Jul 27, 2015, 1:12 PM UTC

lmorchard wrote: post #116

yuhong wrote: post #114

browsers themselves offered built-in mechanisms to support advertising that respect privacy & performance? I wonder which kinds of proposals you would suggest. It should also cover analytics.

Well, some of the proposals flip the relationship on ads. For example, rather than getting access to fine-grained personal data about readers, a marketer gets some coarse data like general location (eg. midwest US) and language. Using that, they propose a set of ads to the browser, and the browser decides which might be relevant based on what it knows about you. The browser keeps the personal data to itself, though.…

Sounds like a good idea...I fear though it may be technically impossible.

Say you write/fork/create a browser that can do this, in order to really work, you have to disable (by default) all ads.

To do this, technically, that means you have to break all third party site interaction. No third party scripts, no jquery includes, etc. etc.

I could see it maybe as a value-added service which competes with traditional ad-based marketing, i.e. aimed at folks who have very strict anti-ad systems put into place. Only issue being is those same folks may also not wish to use said browser...

So I don't think this is possible, even if its a nice idea. You'd basically have to rebuild the web to do this. The only way it could flourish would be as an independent network of its own.

Re: The Verge's web sucks

#137

Post by nathan_long » Mon, Jul 27, 2015, 1:26 PM UTC

krstck wrote: post #91

Remember that beautiful, amazing time when pop-up blockers had forever defeated those obnoxious and intrusive ads? My timeline could be off, but I'm thinking somewhere around 2004-2006, when Firefox was really picking up steam. I feel like the current web is in some kind of alternative universe where we've been shifted back in time over a decade. I have to use Ublock and Ghostery to make the web even remotely usable.…

> Perhaps websites just need to die altogether, and instead we'll just use APIs. You choose how to render the content in your browser according to your desires.

Yeah. Maybe you could download some kind of menu of what the site offers. You could go ahead and download the text because it's tiny, but you could decide, eg, "I will request the image resources but not the javascript ones", or "I will display the text in a font of my own choosing".

The site content could use a language to "mark up" what it offers, and the site's specifications could be overridden by user preferences, sort of a "cascade" of priority.