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My iPad is 10 years old and there are websites that bring it to its knees, especially mobile.twitter.com links. I don't click them anymore, it's too frustrating

My iPad is 10 years old and there are websites that bring it to its knees, especially mobile.twitter.com links. I don't click them anymore, it's too frustrating. Maybe web devs should be given low-end machines to work on so they can experience what their non-desktop users experience. The whole 'mobile web' distinction really shouldn't need to exist, my iPad isn't a mobile phone from 2005.

coder543 6y ago
If your iPad is 10 years old, then it’s an original iPad. The original iPad received its last update 8 years ago. I really enjoyed my launch day original iPad — it was incredible, just because it was such a new experience, but the hardware was severely underpowered even for the time. Laptops from 2010 are probably much better equipped to browse the web today than that 2010 iPad. It just seems very idealistic to expect most websites to cater to a browser that hasn’t received an update in 8 years running on a processor that has a fraction of the power of any Raspberry Pi 2 or above. Modern iPads are served the “real” web by default, further emphasizing why you would benefit from upgrading at least once a decade.
- jamil7 6y ago
  But what is the great new experience offered by something like twitter’s web site that demands all that new power and brings that machine to it’s knees? What cutting edge features is it offering that it didn’t offer in 2010? Thats kind of what made the web a cool platform, it was backwards compatible by default and could run on all kinds of things.
  - pmlnr 6y ago
    Tracking and data collection. The way the make money. Twitter in 2010 was actively losing money, if I recall correctly. That said... modern frontend that doesn't run proparly on a core 2 intel machine with no adblocking should be massacred.
- echlebek 6y ago
  A 1 GHz Cortex-8 is a ton of computing power. The proof of this is iOS itself. When you bring the GPU into the mix, it's obviously capable of a lot as an operating system. There are no problems displaying high resolution static content and video content on an iPad. But around the same time, it became fashionable to start rendering static content on the fly, maybe inserting some not-so-static content around it to justify this choice. Add in advertising. And a browser that you might have trouble controlling script execution on. Add in tracking. Remember that story about how eBay fingerprints your browser in part by mapping the open websockets you have? That costs power and cycles. And the cookies have been piling up since the 90s. Speaking of storage, it's now much more common to use localStorage. Now anyone with a website on the internet can store appreciable amounts of stuff on your computer if you visit their website. And they can read and write that storage as much as they want while you're on their site, without regard for your computer's performance. And all of this is just considered normal and regular. This isn't even getting towards abusive behaviour like running a crypto miner in a browser or something. This is just web applications continually expanding their resource entitlements. The web is a great honking tire fire. Many articles and books have been written about this, many of them are summarily dismissed by web developers as ivory tower nonsense. But the trajectory of system requirements for displaying mainly-text documents is growing at an unsustainable pace, and there is eventually going to be some kind of reckoning. I have a $3000 1 year old laptop, and sometimes slack gets so slow I have to kill the browser process and start over again. The issue is not hardware.
  - miffy900 6y ago
    >I have a $3000 1 year old laptop, and sometimes slack gets so slow I have to kill the browser process and start over again. The issue is not hardware. Keep in mind, the 1st gen iPad was single core and only had 256MB of RAM, which was the same RAM capacity as the then current iPod touch. Compare it to any PC with a single core Intel CPU and the experience will be largely the same, except of course the Intel CPU will require x10 more energy to run. And yes, it did have a really great CPU for it's time. It's core CPU architecture remained largely unchanged for 2 more generations. The iPad 2 added an extra core (A5), and with the iPad 3rd gen, Apple gave it more GPU power in the SoC (A5X).
kyawzazaw 6y ago
I think it's a bit over too much to expect sites to cater to a device (and somewhat underpowered at that) that hasn't received any updates for several years.
- stan_rogers 6y ago
  No, it really isn't. Treat every connection like horrible shared wifi in a convention centre, all data as if it's an overage charge, and all of the processing as if your users' batteries are mere seconds from dead. Always. As a pleasant side-effect, you get pleasantly snappy performance on old gear - which may be the latest and greatest your users can afford without avoiding whatever it is you're trying to sell.
kutorio 6y ago
how is the battery still alive?

coder543 6y ago

If your iPad is 10 years old, then it’s an original iPad. The original iPad received its last update 8 years ago. I really enjoyed my launch day original iPad — it was incredible, just because it was such a new experience, but the hardware was severely underpowered even for the time. Laptops from 2010 are probably much better equipped to browse the web today than that 2010 iPad. It just seems very idealistic to expect most websites to cater to a browser that hasn’t received an update in 8 years running on a processor that has a fraction of the power of any Raspberry Pi 2 or above. Modern iPads are served the “real” web by default, further emphasizing why you would benefit from upgrading at least once a decade.

jamil7 6y ago
But what is the great new experience offered by something like twitter’s web site that demands all that new power and brings that machine to it’s knees? What cutting edge features is it offering that it didn’t offer in 2010? Thats kind of what made the web a cool platform, it was backwards compatible by default and could run on all kinds of things.
- pmlnr 6y ago
  Tracking and data collection. The way the make money. Twitter in 2010 was actively losing money, if I recall correctly. That said... modern frontend that doesn't run proparly on a core 2 intel machine with no adblocking should be massacred.
echlebek 6y ago
A 1 GHz Cortex-8 is a ton of computing power. The proof of this is iOS itself. When you bring the GPU into the mix, it's obviously capable of a lot as an operating system. There are no problems displaying high resolution static content and video content on an iPad. But around the same time, it became fashionable to start rendering static content on the fly, maybe inserting some not-so-static content around it to justify this choice. Add in advertising. And a browser that you might have trouble controlling script execution on. Add in tracking. Remember that story about how eBay fingerprints your browser in part by mapping the open websockets you have? That costs power and cycles. And the cookies have been piling up since the 90s. Speaking of storage, it's now much more common to use localStorage. Now anyone with a website on the internet can store appreciable amounts of stuff on your computer if you visit their website. And they can read and write that storage as much as they want while you're on their site, without regard for your computer's performance. And all of this is just considered normal and regular. This isn't even getting towards abusive behaviour like running a crypto miner in a browser or something. This is just web applications continually expanding their resource entitlements. The web is a great honking tire fire. Many articles and books have been written about this, many of them are summarily dismissed by web developers as ivory tower nonsense. But the trajectory of system requirements for displaying mainly-text documents is growing at an unsustainable pace, and there is eventually going to be some kind of reckoning. I have a $3000 1 year old laptop, and sometimes slack gets so slow I have to kill the browser process and start over again. The issue is not hardware.
- miffy900 6y ago
  >I have a $3000 1 year old laptop, and sometimes slack gets so slow I have to kill the browser process and start over again. The issue is not hardware. Keep in mind, the 1st gen iPad was single core and only had 256MB of RAM, which was the same RAM capacity as the then current iPod touch. Compare it to any PC with a single core Intel CPU and the experience will be largely the same, except of course the Intel CPU will require x10 more energy to run. And yes, it did have a really great CPU for it's time. It's core CPU architecture remained largely unchanged for 2 more generations. The iPad 2 added an extra core (A5), and with the iPad 3rd gen, Apple gave it more GPU power in the SoC (A5X).

kyawzazaw 6y ago

I think it's a bit over too much to expect sites to cater to a device (and somewhat underpowered at that) that hasn't received any updates for several years.

stan_rogers 6y ago
No, it really isn't. Treat every connection like horrible shared wifi in a convention centre, all data as if it's an overage charge, and all of the processing as if your users' batteries are mere seconds from dead. Always. As a pleasant side-effect, you get pleasantly snappy performance on old gear - which may be the latest and greatest your users can afford without avoiding whatever it is you're trying to sell.

kutorio 6y ago

how is the battery still alive?