6 ms·

So... it's 2013, and I'm sitting here with my blazingly fast nexus 4, and the web sites I visit are... slow. terrible. broken. spammy. Half of them have 'popup

So... it's 2013, and I'm sitting here with my blazingly fast nexus 4, and the web sites I visit are... slow. terrible. broken. spammy. Half of them have 'popups' that try to banner at the bottom of the screen, but end up flailing wilding and either taking up the entire screen, or just helpfully sitting exactly over the middle of the page. A lot of them try repeatedly to direct me to a specific page, or a native app when ever I flick between pages. The links are tiny and impossible to click on without zooming in. It's just a terrible, terrible experience. How do we get from this broken UX experience story of right now, into the magical compelling 'mobile web app' future that OP talks about? I just don't see a roadmap for it. :(

lifeisstillgood 14y ago
You are on a site that is not broken, slow or spammy. It has "stickiness" and "retention" that all of those sites cannot dream of. Good User Experience beats terrible. Good user experience makes money - trust us, the market will win.
- anon1385 14y ago
  >You are on a site that is not broken, slow or spammy. Is this sarcasm? I honestly can't tell. You have never experienced the expired link error? Or the 'site not available' error? HN is one of the most broken websites I frequently visit. Also you ignored the part about tiny links. HN is full of tiny links: have you used the site on a phone and tried to upvote a post?
  - lifeisstillgood 14y ago
    No, not sarcasm. HN sits with craigslist on the set of sites that the UX is in the community not the site.
- dhimes 14y ago
  This site is totally broken for mobile, and has been for years despite complaints.
  - brudgers 14y ago
    It works reasonably on my Dell Venue Pro with Windows Phone and IE, though there are a few glitches when long comment pages don't word wrap. But I've been using HN on my phone for almost two years. Having a hardware keyboard helps - my Nokia brick had one too.
  - lifeisstillgood 14y ago
    I surf this site on my iphone daily. Yes I occassionally downvote something I did not mean to, yes dead link annoys me if I lose what I typed. But the user experience of sharing and gathering opinions of intelligent well informed people from all corners of the world and backgrounds more than compensates. IMO of course. And thats what I mean - Craigslist is the other "broken" site that does UX well. Its not meant to be pretty or responsive - its meant to do what I expect it to do. If pg decided to fix the broken CR/LF issue, he might be tempted to add bootstrap, and then make it responsive, and then have a feedback form. So I quite like #lazilyproductive
    - StavrosK 14y ago
      Please don't say "UX" when you mean "content".
      - lifeisstillgood 14y ago
        My experience of HN is mostly reading the content. The User Interface is the text box, the outstanding orange/grey theme. But the experience is, upvote buttons that are too small to use well, and great insightful posts from clever informed people. Also me. I do mean experience. Its a holistic thing.
        StavrosK 14y ago
        The term "UX" doesn't generally include the content. I don't consider VLC to have bad UX if it's playing a movie I don't like.
bmuon 14y ago
I worked as a front-end developer for an adnetwork for two years, so I take a little responsibility for your experience. I tried my best, but there just wasn't that much interest in getting it right. Here's why I think we're all having a hard time with advertising in mobile. Basically, adnetworks are still learning how to do it right, the same way designers and developers are still learning how to do mobile websites right. The layout issue you mention comes from a conjunction of various reasons: * Marketing thinks mobile == iOS, which sets limited expectations and for example means developers have a hard time getting a variety of devices to test on * Adnetworks are likely targeting mobile with the same front-end infrastructure they use for desktop. Most of them still target IE6 so they're trying the same ideas * Old iOS versions and many other webkit browsers have big issues with fixed positioning. First they didn't support it. When they did, they still had issues rendering while scrolling and firing the correct events * Ads in mobile require a complex layout but the standard in the industry is that the website doesn't have to do anything but insert a script tag in the page. If there was teamwork between websites and ads, they could use better layout tools like flexbox * No adblock on mobile (yet?) :P Hopefully it'll change.
- chris_wot 14y ago
  Frankly, if all the ad networks in existence fall over and die from their own crudulence, I'll not shed any tears whatsoever. Any site that uses crap ads that affect my user experience will really have to be something special for me to continue to use them. I'm happy to leave these sites for other sites that don't do stupid things to users.
  - Ntrails 14y ago
    If only it were that easy to shift away from facebook... The ability to properly adblock is actually a genuine factor that could make my next mobile something other than an iPhone
- cxhristian 14y ago
  No adblock on mobile (yet?) :P Rooted Android phones can install apps[0] that block most ads (I think it only blocks connections to the ads and doesn't do any fancy CSS rules). And Firefox on Android has Adblock Plus browser extension which as far as I know blocks ads like it does on the desktop version. No root needed for this. [0]: AdAway (I use this) https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.adaway https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.adaway Adblock Plus for Android (Seems to have some non-root support, I haven't tried it): https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.adblockplus.android https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.adblockplu... This app above is not the same as the browser extension mentioned before
MatthewPhillips 14y ago
> So... it's 2013, and I'm sitting here with my blazingly fast nexus 4, and the web sites I visit are... slow. terrible. broken. spammy. No, your browser sucks. Because there is virtually no competition among browsers on mobile. The vast majority of users never even think to use any but the default and therefore there is little incentive to make the big improvements they need.
RobAley 14y ago
You (as with most of us) probably spend so much time on the web now, shuttling around many many different websites, that you don't notice (or remember) that a large proportion of the myriad of native software, beyond a few well polished examples, exhibits flaws that while different are just as annoying, slow, buggy and otherwise irritating. Bad websites are just like bad software. There's a chance that my making it easier to create apps there will be an increase in bad ones, but there should be an increase in good ones as well. There has been on the web.
- film42 14y ago
  I think a good way or restating your point is that, the better web gets i.e. more advanced frameworks with better testing suites, the harder it is to screw up. A point I'd like to make: At the end of the day though, mobile _can_ be fast, but it just doesn't compete with native, yet. When I take a web project after concluding an iOS app, I miss being able to run tests and deploy to my phone or iPad in one place and easily. I miss how formal native code feels over a javascript stack. I hope this changes one day, and I love what Firefox OS is promising, but until then, I will be working with native solutions.
ricw 14y ago
And this doesn't even mention the pain of actually MAKING such a webpage. HTML5/javascript/css are, to put it blunt, rubbish and antiquated technologies. Why even force people to use this "boxed" and shit set? Firefox OS is just wrong from so many perspectives..
- marknutter 14y ago
  This is just trolling, come on now.
  - ricw 14y ago
    Not at all. Dead serious. If HTML/CSS/javascript had been properly developed we wouldn't even have to deal with all the issues surrounding web dev. All these issues have been addressed by OS development decades ago (e.g. duplex connectivity, UX layout, MVC split, performance, just to name a few), yet we still have to deal with them now. Million of man-hours have been wasted due to them.. So no, this is not trolling. Mobile apps have been an absolute blessing and finally enabled proper mobile development. I don't see a need to go back to html other than legacy..
    - marknutter 14y ago
      Mobile apps have made it possible to write your app once and have it work on multiple platforms? Gee, I must have missed that (as I post to HN, a web app that works on multiple platforms).
      - davidw 14y ago
        In addition to that, you can deploy your apps on your own terms, rather than Apple's or Google's.
      - rimantas 14y ago
        Don't kid yourself. Anyone writing web app "once and have it work on multiple platforms" is just writing different workaround for the different platforms into the same codebase. HTML was created to markup structure of the document, CSS was created to style the look of that document. JavaScript was created to add some interactity. The idea of the HTML web was about documents, not apps. Now compare that to the native SDK's which were created for apps develpoment and specifically targeted to solve specific problems. Anyone claiming that web technologies today or tomorrow will be a good replacement for native SDKs has very little idea about native SDKs. Myriad of frameworks trying just so hack some MVC with webtech is a good indicator about the suitability for the task. Sure, with enough time you can bolt-on enough feature on the top of HTML and JS to make it bearable for apps development: but it will be just that — stuff bolted on the tool created to solve completely different problems. I don't know why looking at every problem like a nail just because all you have is a hammer is suddenly a good idea.
davidw 14y ago
Short version: "If you're not paying for it, you are the product, not the customer". Most of the sites probably don't have a big incentive to make a really awesome mobile app type experience, which would involve zero ads, and a lot of work to make the site work like an actual app on a variety of target devices.
marknutter 14y ago
Except for the ones that aren't slow, terrible, broken, spammy. Selection bias at its finest. I could open up a random sampling of native apps from the Play or App store and make the same ridiculous claims about how lame native apps are - because 90% of native apps are complete crap.
firefoxman1 14y ago
Really, this is the top comment? Everything you just listed is exactly what FirefoxOS is trying to fix.
- shadowmint 14y ago
  How? Making firefox os is great, but how do we get from here to, people making web apps that don't suck on mobiles? Is it a market place they're going to sell apps on and curate so they're no rubbish? Is it a platform that is so great and compelling people are going to stop making native apps for it? Is it a new browser that is so amazing they everyone is going to swap to it, and it makes web apps responsive and amazing? Is it an entire 'platform' that runs inside a browser? A native app that acts like it's own 'OS' that runs on all phones? ...you get the idea. What about firefox OS is going to change anything? I'm not trolling, if you can figure it out, tell me, because then I'll pitch it, at work, and we can start down that path.
  - sp332 14y ago
    > Is it a market place they're going to sell apps on and curate so they're no rubbish? Yes. https://marketplace.firefox.com/ https://marketplace.firefox.com/ They're not interesting in locking down the device to just one app source though. > Is it a platform that is so great and compelling people are going to stop making native apps for it? I think that's the idea, yes :) > Is it a new browser that is so amazing they everyone is going to swap to it, and it makes web apps responsive and amazing? Browsers are already pretty cool; what's good for Firefox is what's good for the web (including webkit browsers). Since Firefox is pursuing consensus and standardization with all their new phone/browser ideas, it should be easier in the future to write cross-platform web/phone apps. > Is it an entire 'platform' that runs inside a browser? A native app that acts like it's own 'OS' that runs on all phones? It sort of is a broswer. It provides a bunch of APIs that make it possible to control phone functions from javascript. So you load a web app, and it can make phone calls and send texts and take pictures and whatever. In this video you can see the app launcher and the phone app written in HTML, CSS, and javascript. http://cnettv.cnet.com/hands-mozilla-firefox-os-boot-gecko/9742-1_53-50124428.html http://cnettv.cnet.com/hands-mozilla-firefox-os-boot-gecko/9...
shardling 14y ago
You could try Firefox Mobile and install adblock.
bergie 14y ago
While a lot of the web is still horribly broken on touchscreen devices, it should be noted that the situation is getting better. The popularity of iOS and Android devices means that a lot of even regular websites now have to pay attention to responsive layouts, large input elements, etc. Of course, there is a lot of web that updates slowly, HN included. Getting all those on board the modern, responsive web will probably take years. But having used touchscreen devices daily for browsing since early 2006, the situation is clearly improving all the time. Popular CSS frameworks like Bootstrap help, too.
sanxiyn 14y ago
Simple. Web sites that are terrible in mobile will die, and will be replaced by better ones.
205guy 14y ago
shadowmint asked: "How do we get from this broken UX experience story of right now, into the magical compelling 'mobile web app' future that OP talks about?" How about: by paying for content? Right now, websites are so messed up (and not just for mobile) because of ads essentially. The content providers want you to look at them, and you'd prefer not to. Unfortunately, 99% of the time, there is not even a way to pay and get a good experience instead. Look at it this way, the only people making money off of my internet usage is my ISP. Actually, I also pay yahoo $20 a year for ad-free mail, but that's the only one. Until that changes, the ads will continue. The industry needs to figure out some sort of micro-payment for content, because nothing else works.
px43 14y ago
Adblock?

lifeisstillgood 14y ago

You are on a site that is not broken, slow or spammy. It has "stickiness" and "retention" that all of those sites cannot dream of. Good User Experience beats terrible. Good user experience makes money - trust us, the market will win.

anon1385 14y ago
>You are on a site that is not broken, slow or spammy. Is this sarcasm? I honestly can't tell. You have never experienced the expired link error? Or the 'site not available' error? HN is one of the most broken websites I frequently visit. Also you ignored the part about tiny links. HN is full of tiny links: have you used the site on a phone and tried to upvote a post?
- lifeisstillgood 14y ago
  No, not sarcasm. HN sits with craigslist on the set of sites that the UX is in the community not the site.
dhimes 14y ago
This site is totally broken for mobile, and has been for years despite complaints.
- brudgers 14y ago
  It works reasonably on my Dell Venue Pro with Windows Phone and IE, though there are a few glitches when long comment pages don't word wrap. But I've been using HN on my phone for almost two years. Having a hardware keyboard helps - my Nokia brick had one too.
- lifeisstillgood 14y ago
  I surf this site on my iphone daily. Yes I occassionally downvote something I did not mean to, yes dead link annoys me if I lose what I typed. But the user experience of sharing and gathering opinions of intelligent well informed people from all corners of the world and backgrounds more than compensates. IMO of course. And thats what I mean - Craigslist is the other "broken" site that does UX well. Its not meant to be pretty or responsive - its meant to do what I expect it to do. If pg decided to fix the broken CR/LF issue, he might be tempted to add bootstrap, and then make it responsive, and then have a feedback form. So I quite like #lazilyproductive
  - StavrosK 14y ago
    Please don't say "UX" when you mean "content".
    - lifeisstillgood 14y ago
      My experience of HN is mostly reading the content. The User Interface is the text box, the outstanding orange/grey theme. But the experience is, upvote buttons that are too small to use well, and great insightful posts from clever informed people. Also me. I do mean experience. Its a holistic thing.
      - StavrosK 14y ago
        The term "UX" doesn't generally include the content. I don't consider VLC to have bad UX if it's playing a movie I don't like.

bmuon 14y ago

I worked as a front-end developer for an adnetwork for two years, so I take a little responsibility for your experience. I tried my best, but there just wasn't that much interest in getting it right. Here's why I think we're all having a hard time with advertising in mobile. Basically, adnetworks are still learning how to do it right, the same way designers and developers are still learning how to do mobile websites right. The layout issue you mention comes from a conjunction of various reasons: * Marketing thinks mobile == iOS, which sets limited expectations and for example means developers have a hard time getting a variety of devices to test on * Adnetworks are likely targeting mobile with the same front-end infrastructure they use for desktop. Most of them still target IE6 so they're trying the same ideas * Old iOS versions and many other webkit browsers have big issues with fixed positioning. First they didn't support it. When they did, they still had issues rendering while scrolling and firing the correct events * Ads in mobile require a complex layout but the standard in the industry is that the website doesn't have to do anything but insert a script tag in the page. If there was teamwork between websites and ads, they could use better layout tools like flexbox * No adblock on mobile (yet?) :P Hopefully it'll change.

chris_wot 14y ago
Frankly, if all the ad networks in existence fall over and die from their own crudulence, I'll not shed any tears whatsoever. Any site that uses crap ads that affect my user experience will really have to be something special for me to continue to use them. I'm happy to leave these sites for other sites that don't do stupid things to users.
- Ntrails 14y ago
  If only it were that easy to shift away from facebook... The ability to properly adblock is actually a genuine factor that could make my next mobile something other than an iPhone
cxhristian 14y ago
No adblock on mobile (yet?) :P Rooted Android phones can install apps[0] that block most ads (I think it only blocks connections to the ads and doesn't do any fancy CSS rules). And Firefox on Android has Adblock Plus browser extension which as far as I know blocks ads like it does on the desktop version. No root needed for this. [0]: AdAway (I use this) https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.adaway https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.adaway Adblock Plus for Android (Seems to have some non-root support, I haven't tried it): https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.adblockplus.android https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.adblockplu... This app above is not the same as the browser extension mentioned before

MatthewPhillips 14y ago

> So... it's 2013, and I'm sitting here with my blazingly fast nexus 4, and the web sites I visit are... slow. terrible. broken. spammy. No, your browser sucks. Because there is virtually no competition among browsers on mobile. The vast majority of users never even think to use any but the default and therefore there is little incentive to make the big improvements they need.

RobAley 14y ago

You (as with most of us) probably spend so much time on the web now, shuttling around many many different websites, that you don't notice (or remember) that a large proportion of the myriad of native software, beyond a few well polished examples, exhibits flaws that while different are just as annoying, slow, buggy and otherwise irritating. Bad websites are just like bad software. There's a chance that my making it easier to create apps there will be an increase in bad ones, but there should be an increase in good ones as well. There has been on the web.

film42 14y ago
I think a good way or restating your point is that, the better web gets i.e. more advanced frameworks with better testing suites, the harder it is to screw up. A point I'd like to make: At the end of the day though, mobile _can_ be fast, but it just doesn't compete with native, yet. When I take a web project after concluding an iOS app, I miss being able to run tests and deploy to my phone or iPad in one place and easily. I miss how formal native code feels over a javascript stack. I hope this changes one day, and I love what Firefox OS is promising, but until then, I will be working with native solutions.

ricw 14y ago

And this doesn't even mention the pain of actually MAKING such a webpage. HTML5/javascript/css are, to put it blunt, rubbish and antiquated technologies. Why even force people to use this "boxed" and shit set? Firefox OS is just wrong from so many perspectives..

marknutter 14y ago
This is just trolling, come on now.
- ricw 14y ago
  Not at all. Dead serious. If HTML/CSS/javascript had been properly developed we wouldn't even have to deal with all the issues surrounding web dev. All these issues have been addressed by OS development decades ago (e.g. duplex connectivity, UX layout, MVC split, performance, just to name a few), yet we still have to deal with them now. Million of man-hours have been wasted due to them.. So no, this is not trolling. Mobile apps have been an absolute blessing and finally enabled proper mobile development. I don't see a need to go back to html other than legacy..
  - marknutter 14y ago
    Mobile apps have made it possible to write your app once and have it work on multiple platforms? Gee, I must have missed that (as I post to HN, a web app that works on multiple platforms).
    - davidw 14y ago
      In addition to that, you can deploy your apps on your own terms, rather than Apple's or Google's.
    - rimantas 14y ago
      Don't kid yourself. Anyone writing web app "once and have it work on multiple platforms" is just writing different workaround for the different platforms into the same codebase. HTML was created to markup structure of the document, CSS was created to style the look of that document. JavaScript was created to add some interactity. The idea of the HTML web was about documents, not apps. Now compare that to the native SDK's which were created for apps develpoment and specifically targeted to solve specific problems. Anyone claiming that web technologies today or tomorrow will be a good replacement for native SDKs has very little idea about native SDKs. Myriad of frameworks trying just so hack some MVC with webtech is a good indicator about the suitability for the task. Sure, with enough time you can bolt-on enough feature on the top of HTML and JS to make it bearable for apps development: but it will be just that — stuff bolted on the tool created to solve completely different problems. I don't know why looking at every problem like a nail just because all you have is a hammer is suddenly a good idea.

davidw 14y ago

Short version: "If you're not paying for it, you are the product, not the customer". Most of the sites probably don't have a big incentive to make a really awesome mobile app type experience, which would involve zero ads, and a lot of work to make the site work like an actual app on a variety of target devices.

marknutter 14y ago

Except for the ones that aren't slow, terrible, broken, spammy. Selection bias at its finest. I could open up a random sampling of native apps from the Play or App store and make the same ridiculous claims about how lame native apps are - because 90% of native apps are complete crap.

firefoxman1 14y ago

Really, this is the top comment? Everything you just listed is exactly what FirefoxOS is trying to fix.

shadowmint 14y ago
How? Making firefox os is great, but how do we get from here to, people making web apps that don't suck on mobiles? Is it a market place they're going to sell apps on and curate so they're no rubbish? Is it a platform that is so great and compelling people are going to stop making native apps for it? Is it a new browser that is so amazing they everyone is going to swap to it, and it makes web apps responsive and amazing? Is it an entire 'platform' that runs inside a browser? A native app that acts like it's own 'OS' that runs on all phones? ...you get the idea. What about firefox OS is going to change anything? I'm not trolling, if you can figure it out, tell me, because then I'll pitch it, at work, and we can start down that path.
- sp332 14y ago
  > Is it a market place they're going to sell apps on and curate so they're no rubbish? Yes. https://marketplace.firefox.com/ https://marketplace.firefox.com/ They're not interesting in locking down the device to just one app source though. > Is it a platform that is so great and compelling people are going to stop making native apps for it? I think that's the idea, yes :) > Is it a new browser that is so amazing they everyone is going to swap to it, and it makes web apps responsive and amazing? Browsers are already pretty cool; what's good for Firefox is what's good for the web (including webkit browsers). Since Firefox is pursuing consensus and standardization with all their new phone/browser ideas, it should be easier in the future to write cross-platform web/phone apps. > Is it an entire 'platform' that runs inside a browser? A native app that acts like it's own 'OS' that runs on all phones? It sort of is a broswer. It provides a bunch of APIs that make it possible to control phone functions from javascript. So you load a web app, and it can make phone calls and send texts and take pictures and whatever. In this video you can see the app launcher and the phone app written in HTML, CSS, and javascript. http://cnettv.cnet.com/hands-mozilla-firefox-os-boot-gecko/9742-1_53-50124428.html http://cnettv.cnet.com/hands-mozilla-firefox-os-boot-gecko/9...

shardling 14y ago

You could try Firefox Mobile and install adblock.

bergie 14y ago

While a lot of the web is still horribly broken on touchscreen devices, it should be noted that the situation is getting better. The popularity of iOS and Android devices means that a lot of even regular websites now have to pay attention to responsive layouts, large input elements, etc. Of course, there is a lot of web that updates slowly, HN included. Getting all those on board the modern, responsive web will probably take years. But having used touchscreen devices daily for browsing since early 2006, the situation is clearly improving all the time. Popular CSS frameworks like Bootstrap help, too.

sanxiyn 14y ago

Simple. Web sites that are terrible in mobile will die, and will be replaced by better ones.

205guy 14y ago

shadowmint asked: "How do we get from this broken UX experience story of right now, into the magical compelling 'mobile web app' future that OP talks about?" How about: by paying for content? Right now, websites are so messed up (and not just for mobile) because of ads essentially. The content providers want you to look at them, and you'd prefer not to. Unfortunately, 99% of the time, there is not even a way to pay and get a good experience instead. Look at it this way, the only people making money off of my internet usage is my ISP. Actually, I also pay yahoo $20 a year for ad-free mail, but that's the only one. Until that changes, the ads will continue. The industry needs to figure out some sort of micro-payment for content, because nothing else works.

px43 14y ago

Adblock?