14 ms·

The Verge's web sucks

345 points by mbrubeck 11y ago

oliyoung 11y ago
These guys (ie Verge) are going to have a really really tough time when iOS9 lands https://developer.apple.com/library/prerelease/ios/releasenotes/General/WhatsNewInSafari/Articles/Safari_9.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/TP40014305-CH9-SW9 https://developer.apple.com/library/prerelease/ios/releaseno...
- psykovsky 11y ago
  You talk like Apple is doing something new and owns the market.
  - BillinghamJ 11y ago
    Not necessarily. But ultimately right now the level of mobile ad blocking is very low. This will make a real difference to that - regardless as to whether it's new or innovative.
  - Cthulhu_ 11y ago
    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.
    - mcintyre1994 11y ago
      You're right about Google, but FWIW Firefox on Android fully supports extensions - including eg uBlock origin.
    - yabatopia 11y ago
      Ghostery has its own mobile browser on Android, blocking ads and trackers.
      - rampantprint 11y ago
        iOS also has a Ghostery app, but it has a less than optimal user experience. The UI is confusing. They bury essential options in the share icon, options that have nothing to do with sharing. I'm not sure if the Android version is as bad as the iOS version.
    - noelsusman 11y ago
      Android supports it in many different forms. If you're rooted you can block pretty much every ad in all apps, but even without root Firefox on Android supports adblocking extensions and there are alternative browsers focused on ad blocking and privacy. Also to be fair you can already block ads on iOS if you jailbreak your phone.
      - honestcoyote 11y ago
        No jailbreak needed. https://www.weblockapp.com/ https://www.weblockapp.com/
- hyperion_ 11y ago
  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 numbers don't suggest a majority. (I don't think assuming over 500 million desktop users is crazy.) Given that iOS is about 20% of total mobile users, this feature will probably make little to no difference, it might be a couple of % of those 20% of users, at the very best.
  - tragic 11y ago
    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&tz=Etc%2FGMT-1 https://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=ad%20blocker&cmpt=q&...
    - hyperion_ 11y ago
      Thanks for the graph, that's quite interesting. Do you have any insight as to why it's risen so sharply during the past three years? I'm thinking maybe it's just connected to the increase in overall (especially smartphone) users of the internet? Even people who have been using desktops for years, use the internet more thanks to smartphones and thus ads become more pervasive in their life, thus perhaps prompting an increase as well? Maybe you can share your thoughts on why you think it would be any indication that the overall percentage of internet users using ad blockers has gone up?
- untilHellbanned 11y ago
  This gives app makers the ability to throttle the ads show when using webViews? So FB, Twitter, etc. can render website content without ads? If so, this is a huge deal and needs to be a separate HN post.
  - jbrooksuk 11y ago
    Already discussed; https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9775711 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9775711
  - yoz-y 11y ago
    This might not work in the webViews but will definitely work in the new Safari View Controller which will most probably become the default way for applications to display links.
- kryptiskt 11y ago
  They can just do what everybody else does, replace the site with "USE THE VERGE APP!!1!", and show the ads there instead. Which is a good reason for Apple to push adblocking in the browser.
  - JustSomeNobody 11y ago
    This is Apple's goal. They want people to write apps and show ads through Apple's own ad network.
  - koyote 11y ago
    Hah, but they recently removed the Verge app from the android store to get people to use the mobile site instead.
- lmorchard 11y ago
  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.
danboarder 11y ago
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 script instead of so many that seem to be redundant?
- thedz 11y ago
  > 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 than another. Even if ultimately it just lowers the bar for the industry.
  - sbarre 11y ago
    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.
    - deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
- sudioStudio64 11y ago
  Why can't the site just collect some data from the client and forward it to the ad networks on the backend? All of this stuff needs to happen out of band.
  - JustSomeNobody 11y ago
    Because the trend is for the client to bear the burden.
rossjudson 11y ago
And it has for a long time (in terms of page performance): http://www.theverge.com/2012/5/21/3034825/the-verge-page-performance http://www.theverge.com/2012/5/21/3034825/the-verge-page-per...
josteink 11y ago
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 http://imgur.com/FqJVB0U You know what? The site and all content loads instantly. It may not be beautiful, but it works a hell of a lot better and is just so feather light it feels surreal. Maybe I'll seriously start using eww for more stuff. This was surprisingly nice.
- Tiksi 11y ago
  Links actually has a graphical mode too: http://paste.click/DdkwUx http://paste.click/DdkwUx There's even a driver to draw straight to a framebuffer. It can be useful if you're on a box without X or break X and need a browser (which is how I found out about it). I don't actually use it unless I have to, but interesting to know.
  - josteink 11y ago
    Wow. Nice. Almost completely related to the discussion at hand: Interesting how much presentation and familiarity affects the cognitive load our mind has to deal with when seeing things. It took me quite some time to realize that the screenshot you posted was of my own eww image-paste on imgur loaded inside a graphical links-session. Have an up-vote good sir :)
  - sp332 11y ago
    A note under Ubuntu: you'll have to install links2 (instead of links), and you may have to change permissions on the fb device to allow your user to write to it, if you don't want to run a browser as root.
- eitally 11y ago
  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, ...).
vinceyuan 11y ago
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.
- dguaraglia 11y ago
  Exactly! The worst (or best) part of having a slow mobile site is mobile platforms are, by and large, single-task platforms: you click on a link and then look at the screen until the page load. If your website makes me stare at a blank screen for over 5 seconds that's it, the attention span for your low-content article that I was about to read out of boredom is gone. Close tab, click next link. I guess it's a self-limiting problem in the end :)
- smackfu 11y ago
  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.
dvh 11y ago
After I started working on my own RSS reader, I started converting more and more website to RSS feeds (e.g. twitter, youtube, all news site) where I only extract interesting bits. It's faster and cleaner, not to mension no ads.
- o87dv 11y ago
  Would you mind sharing the program?
  - dvh 11y ago
    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.
    - o87dv 11y ago
      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.
      - dvh 11y ago
        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 http://pastebin.com/wpjZ6azZ I did it just recently and I use it to parse DAWN and New Horizont feeds.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- jacquesm 11y ago
  More and more sites (twitter is a major offender here) are switching off their RSS feeds because they can't control the readers. See for instance: https://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/user_timeline.rss?screen_name=jmattheij https://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/user_timeline.rss?screen_...
forty 11y ago
I found it quite funny that this article ends like this https://imgur.com/SpEp9UF https://imgur.com/SpEp9UF :)
- yoz-y 11y ago
  Well, at least Disqus has the merit of actually providing value to people visiting your website.
- lmorchard 11y ago
  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.
mike-cardwell 11y ago
That article gets a score of 15% on Google PageSpeed - https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theverge.com%2F2015%2F7%2F20%2F9002721%2Fthe-mobile-web-sucks https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=...
- omouse 11y ago
  Still loads faster than The Verge ;)
  - EdiX 11y ago
    It's The Verge's article that gets 15%, OP gets 63% (faster than The Verge, obviously).
    - lmorchard 11y ago
      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.
- ubernostrum 11y ago
  PageSpeed is... a mixed bag. It likes to yell at me that my font size is too small, and tell me to "set a legible font size". When I'm not actually setting a base font size and instead adjusting things relative to the browser's default. Their recommendation to "fix" this is to specify absolute font sizes, which is the opposite of basically every accessibility requirement I've ever read. Similarly, they complain that I'm not "leveraging browser caching" -- but the un-cached resource is the Google Analytics JavaScript. It also doesn't catch the one actual user-experience-problem bug that I know about and am working to fix. So while it's enjoyable to poke fun at someone through PageSpeed results, I'd take it with an extremely large grain of salt.
mr_sturd 11y ago
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-sucks https://www.theverge.com/2015/7/20/9002721/the-mobile-web-su...
- JustSomeNobody 11y ago
  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.
  - giancarlostoro 11y ago
    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). There's also the hell of being redirected to a websites "mobile" friendly site, only they redirect you to the home page, not the mobile version of the content you were trying to get to (seriously?) I mean there's so much. I usually have to ask for the desktop version of websites, and this is ignoring JavaScript that jacks up your resources and flash based content. Try triggering OnMouseOver on mobile as well. Lots of warts to browsing the internet on a Mobile phone.
    - deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
    - krstck 11y ago
      I hate how helpless I feel when using a phone. This website wants to open the App Store? Guess I have to let it. I was hoping this was at least a little better on the Android side of things, but maybe not. Sigh.
    - 11y ago
insin 11y ago
> 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 had open to watch things load. Same article in a new incognito window with Adblock Plus enabled: 1.5 MB transferred, finished in 16.94s. Screenshots: https://twitter.com/jbscript/status/624535428620791808 https://twitter.com/jbscript/status/624535428620791808
- christop 11y ago
  I guess that can be reduced a lot if not only adverts, but all the tracking scripts are blocked. I just tested this with uMatrix where I use pretty much the defaults, but allow the two CDNs for theverge.com. Ended up with 600kB downloaded and 1.37s load time on an empty cache.
- jeremiep 11y ago
  I've replaced Adblock with uBlock and uMatrix and couldn't be happier. It seems to have a smaller footprint in the browser and better results at filtering away unwanted requests. The only thing that would make this perfect is if they would also run on my Android phone.
  - fencepost 11y ago
    uBlock Origin at least runs in Firefox on Android; I rarely use Chrome on it so can't speak to that.
    - nowey 11y ago
      i uninstalled chrome and facebook, replaced with ff and tinfoil. much better battery life. only google apps i have is play music, google and translate (im rooted)
- gorhill 11y ago
justuk 11y ago
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 engines (Mozilla), having a legacy business (CNN) etc.
- lmorchard 11y ago
  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
mdevere 11y ago
The Verge has some interesting long-form from time to time but it's subsidised by endless clickbait and empty 'conversation-starter' content. Not to mention their recent move to close Comments being a cynical strategy to get people using their forums. Realise that's OT but wanted to get it off my chest.
- cheshire137 11y ago
  What's this about comments? Do their articles not have comments and a form at the bottom anymore?
  - mdevere 11y ago
    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.
    - vvanders 11y ago
      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 nearly as much after that.
      - A_COMPUTER 11y ago
        It had been brewing a while, in my opinion. What I was seeing happening was, reasonable people would point out flaws in the article, then a moderator would jump in and argue with the person like they were a child and their points were stupid, escalating the situation and probably now pissing off more people than just the original complainer. I stopped reading their comments because of the moderators. Moderators should be seen and not heard.
Grue3 11y ago
Ah, it's that site that's mostly known for posting inaccurate information about Android and closing off comments because people called them out on it. Why would anyone even go there anymore? They haven't published anything worth reading in ages.
wiremine 11y ago
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 much of a reason to fix it on their own.
- otis_inf 11y ago
  > 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 competitors are forced to be used less (by Google's own actions) more people might be using Google ad networks.
  - _lce0 11y ago
    nah, that wont work. that would surely end up in legal battle, from the ad agencies saying that Google used their monopolistic power on the search industry just to boost their analytics product.
    - roninb 11y ago
      IANAL, but I would think that as long as, algorithmically, Google ensures it's weighing all ads and trackers equally (read: whatever your concept of fairly is) they could prove that it truly is in everyone's benefit. In a similar vein to the aforementioned "Death to Small Businesses Day."
    - yuhong 11y ago
      How about just counting the number of ad trackers?
  - fanf2 11y ago
leni536 11y ago
It's kind of funny to open up Verge with both uBlock and uMatrix enabled only allowing only 1st party scripts. First I thought that I have to enable some js to view the article, but then I noticed the small scrollbar and scrolled down. https://imgur.com/a/YVbDE https://imgur.com/a/YVbDE
Lagged2Death 11y ago
...it downloaded 12MB - a little over 7MB in that is JavaScript! 7MB was about the install size of Microsoft Windows 3.0, a complete (if crummy) OS.
wtbob 11y ago
And people laugh at me for disabling JavaScript!
ised 11y ago
"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 of indirection. This dance is not of much consequence in the case of a single name. But in the aggregate, e.g., many names requested from one overloaded site (such as one author singles out) after another, it does add up. This also creates a larger margin for errors (failed lookups getting retried and timing out, again and again... while the user sits and waits).
- lmorchard 11y ago
  Actually, FWIW, I'm using pairNIC.com for DNS. I do host on Amazon S3, though.
  - ised 11y ago
    That means the full lookup for your personal domainname is for an Amazon S3 domainname. PairNIC just handles the first lookup to give the CNAME for blog.lmorchard.com, pointing to Amazon. Then there are multiple other CNAME's that Amazon uses. It is about the same as looking up a Akamai customer domain. Lots of extra DNS queries.
manigandham 11y ago
The problem is shared between publishers and ad networks. Sites are loading up on anything and everything to offset costs and it's only getting worse with adblock. And ad networks are just built with poor engineering and no attention paid to the user's experience. It's too easy to whip up a basic ad server and just load a dozen more tags on a page with the focus being volume and clicks. Unfortunately, there isn't an easy way to fix things because of the way money flows. Disclaimer: I'm the founder of a digital ad network.
devioustree 11y ago
At lot of replies to that Verge article seem to be addressing the click-bait title and not the content. The content is concerned with why an old Macbook (with comparable specs to a new iPhone) will handle the web much better than said iPhone.
- lmorchard 11y ago
  I need to do more specific digging on this to have a good answer. From the bits I know, mobile browsers offer more conservative support for caching & hardware acceleration. Phones are way more sensitive to battery use & heat than a plugged-in laptop. You can't really directly compare a phone to a laptop, even if they seem to have similar hardware numbers. The form factor & use cases matter.
krstck 11y ago
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. Oh wait....RSS.
- nathan_long 11y ago
  > 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.
yuhong 11y ago
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.
- lmorchard 11y ago
  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. Marketers get some analytics on the response to their ads, but not full-on tracking.
  - yuhong 11y ago
    Good idea, actually.
  - smaudet 11y ago
    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.
Yhippa 11y ago
> Believe it or not, the Content Services team at Mozilla is thinking about way more than just "plunking ads into Firefox". Like, what if we actually accepted the fact that ads are a way of funding the web at large, and browsers themselves offered built-in mechanisms to support advertising that respect privacy & performance? Yeah, that's a bit of a change from browsers' traditional neutrality. But, it could be a better deal for publishers and users together. I'm curious as to how that could ever be done. I feel that it's almost impossible without somehow getting user information. I feel the trend is that ads are going to continue to be tuned to people and aspects about them. Maybe fully homomorphic encryption can do that without violating privacy but that's a long way off. > Here's another idea: Almost a year ago, I heard the notion of "Subscribe 2 Web" at Mozilla. The gist is that you're worth about $6.20 per month across publishers via advertising revenues. What if you paid that much into an account yourself every month and used a mechanism built into your browser to distribute that money? Yeah, it's micropayments, but I find it interesting that these folks came up with a specific dollar amount that doesn't sound terrible. It exists. It's called Contributor by Google: https://www.google.com/contributor/welcome/ https://www.google.com/contributor/welcome/. If anybody needs an invite please let me know.
udkl 11y ago
I concur ... The verge has been out of my feed for a long time .... their site feels 'heavy' and filled with distractions ...

345 points by mbrubeck 11y ago

These guys (ie Verge) are going to have a really really tough time when iOS9 lands https://developer.apple.com/library/prerelease/ios/releasenotes/General/WhatsNewInSafari/Articles/Safari_9.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/TP40014305-CH9-SW9 https://developer.apple.com/library/prerelease/ios/releaseno...

psykovsky 11y ago
You talk like Apple is doing something new and owns the market.
- BillinghamJ 11y ago
  Not necessarily. But ultimately right now the level of mobile ad blocking is very low. This will make a real difference to that - regardless as to whether it's new or innovative.
- Cthulhu_ 11y ago
  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.
  - mcintyre1994 11y ago
    You're right about Google, but FWIW Firefox on Android fully supports extensions - including eg uBlock origin.
  - yabatopia 11y ago
    Ghostery has its own mobile browser on Android, blocking ads and trackers.
    - rampantprint 11y ago
      iOS also has a Ghostery app, but it has a less than optimal user experience. The UI is confusing. They bury essential options in the share icon, options that have nothing to do with sharing. I'm not sure if the Android version is as bad as the iOS version.
  - noelsusman 11y ago
    Android supports it in many different forms. If you're rooted you can block pretty much every ad in all apps, but even without root Firefox on Android supports adblocking extensions and there are alternative browsers focused on ad blocking and privacy. Also to be fair you can already block ads on iOS if you jailbreak your phone.
    - honestcoyote 11y ago
      No jailbreak needed. https://www.weblockapp.com/ https://www.weblockapp.com/
hyperion_ 11y ago
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 numbers don't suggest a majority. (I don't think assuming over 500 million desktop users is crazy.) Given that iOS is about 20% of total mobile users, this feature will probably make little to no difference, it might be a couple of % of those 20% of users, at the very best.
- tragic 11y ago
  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&tz=Etc%2FGMT-1 https://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=ad%20blocker&cmpt=q&...
  - hyperion_ 11y ago
    Thanks for the graph, that's quite interesting. Do you have any insight as to why it's risen so sharply during the past three years? I'm thinking maybe it's just connected to the increase in overall (especially smartphone) users of the internet? Even people who have been using desktops for years, use the internet more thanks to smartphones and thus ads become more pervasive in their life, thus perhaps prompting an increase as well? Maybe you can share your thoughts on why you think it would be any indication that the overall percentage of internet users using ad blockers has gone up?
untilHellbanned 11y ago
This gives app makers the ability to throttle the ads show when using webViews? So FB, Twitter, etc. can render website content without ads? If so, this is a huge deal and needs to be a separate HN post.
- jbrooksuk 11y ago
  Already discussed; https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9775711 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9775711
- yoz-y 11y ago
  This might not work in the webViews but will definitely work in the new Safari View Controller which will most probably become the default way for applications to display links.
kryptiskt 11y ago
They can just do what everybody else does, replace the site with "USE THE VERGE APP!!1!", and show the ads there instead. Which is a good reason for Apple to push adblocking in the browser.
- JustSomeNobody 11y ago
  This is Apple's goal. They want people to write apps and show ads through Apple's own ad network.
- koyote 11y ago
  Hah, but they recently removed the Verge app from the android store to get people to use the mobile site instead.
lmorchard 11y ago
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.

danboarder 11y ago

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 script instead of so many that seem to be redundant?

thedz 11y ago
> 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 than another. Even if ultimately it just lowers the bar for the industry.
- sbarre 11y ago
  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.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
sudioStudio64 11y ago
Why can't the site just collect some data from the client and forward it to the ad networks on the backend? All of this stuff needs to happen out of band.
- JustSomeNobody 11y ago
  Because the trend is for the client to bear the burden.

rossjudson 11y ago

And it has for a long time (in terms of page performance): http://www.theverge.com/2012/5/21/3034825/the-verge-page-performance http://www.theverge.com/2012/5/21/3034825/the-verge-page-per...

josteink 11y ago

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 http://imgur.com/FqJVB0U You know what? The site and all content loads instantly. It may not be beautiful, but it works a hell of a lot better and is just so feather light it feels surreal. Maybe I'll seriously start using eww for more stuff. This was surprisingly nice.

Tiksi 11y ago
Links actually has a graphical mode too: http://paste.click/DdkwUx http://paste.click/DdkwUx There's even a driver to draw straight to a framebuffer. It can be useful if you're on a box without X or break X and need a browser (which is how I found out about it). I don't actually use it unless I have to, but interesting to know.
- josteink 11y ago
  Wow. Nice. Almost completely related to the discussion at hand: Interesting how much presentation and familiarity affects the cognitive load our mind has to deal with when seeing things. It took me quite some time to realize that the screenshot you posted was of my own eww image-paste on imgur loaded inside a graphical links-session. Have an up-vote good sir :)
- sp332 11y ago
  A note under Ubuntu: you'll have to install links2 (instead of links), and you may have to change permissions on the fb device to allow your user to write to it, if you don't want to run a browser as root.
eitally 11y ago
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, ...).

vinceyuan 11y ago

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.

dguaraglia 11y ago
Exactly! The worst (or best) part of having a slow mobile site is mobile platforms are, by and large, single-task platforms: you click on a link and then look at the screen until the page load. If your website makes me stare at a blank screen for over 5 seconds that's it, the attention span for your low-content article that I was about to read out of boredom is gone. Close tab, click next link. I guess it's a self-limiting problem in the end :)
smackfu 11y ago
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.

dvh 11y ago

After I started working on my own RSS reader, I started converting more and more website to RSS feeds (e.g. twitter, youtube, all news site) where I only extract interesting bits. It's faster and cleaner, not to mension no ads.

o87dv 11y ago
Would you mind sharing the program?
- dvh 11y ago
  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.
  - o87dv 11y ago
    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.
    - dvh 11y ago
      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 http://pastebin.com/wpjZ6azZ I did it just recently and I use it to parse DAWN and New Horizont feeds.
deleted 11y ago
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jacquesm 11y ago
More and more sites (twitter is a major offender here) are switching off their RSS feeds because they can't control the readers. See for instance: https://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/user_timeline.rss?screen_name=jmattheij https://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/user_timeline.rss?screen_...

forty 11y ago

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

yoz-y 11y ago
Well, at least Disqus has the merit of actually providing value to people visiting your website.
lmorchard 11y ago
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.

mike-cardwell 11y ago

That article gets a score of 15% on Google PageSpeed - https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theverge.com%2F2015%2F7%2F20%2F9002721%2Fthe-mobile-web-sucks https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=...

omouse 11y ago
Still loads faster than The Verge ;)
- EdiX 11y ago
  It's The Verge's article that gets 15%, OP gets 63% (faster than The Verge, obviously).
  - lmorchard 11y ago
    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.
ubernostrum 11y ago
PageSpeed is... a mixed bag. It likes to yell at me that my font size is too small, and tell me to "set a legible font size". When I'm not actually setting a base font size and instead adjusting things relative to the browser's default. Their recommendation to "fix" this is to specify absolute font sizes, which is the opposite of basically every accessibility requirement I've ever read. Similarly, they complain that I'm not "leveraging browser caching" -- but the un-cached resource is the Google Analytics JavaScript. It also doesn't catch the one actual user-experience-problem bug that I know about and am working to fix. So while it's enjoyable to poke fun at someone through PageSpeed results, I'd take it with an extremely large grain of salt.

mr_sturd 11y ago

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-sucks https://www.theverge.com/2015/7/20/9002721/the-mobile-web-su...

JustSomeNobody 11y ago
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.
- giancarlostoro 11y ago
  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). There's also the hell of being redirected to a websites "mobile" friendly site, only they redirect you to the home page, not the mobile version of the content you were trying to get to (seriously?) I mean there's so much. I usually have to ask for the desktop version of websites, and this is ignoring JavaScript that jacks up your resources and flash based content. Try triggering OnMouseOver on mobile as well. Lots of warts to browsing the internet on a Mobile phone.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - krstck 11y ago
    I hate how helpless I feel when using a phone. This website wants to open the App Store? Guess I have to let it. I was hoping this was at least a little better on the Android side of things, but maybe not. Sigh.
  - 11y ago

insin 11y ago

> 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 had open to watch things load. Same article in a new incognito window with Adblock Plus enabled: 1.5 MB transferred, finished in 16.94s. Screenshots: https://twitter.com/jbscript/status/624535428620791808 https://twitter.com/jbscript/status/624535428620791808

christop 11y ago
I guess that can be reduced a lot if not only adverts, but all the tracking scripts are blocked. I just tested this with uMatrix where I use pretty much the defaults, but allow the two CDNs for theverge.com. Ended up with 600kB downloaded and 1.37s load time on an empty cache.
jeremiep 11y ago
I've replaced Adblock with uBlock and uMatrix and couldn't be happier. It seems to have a smaller footprint in the browser and better results at filtering away unwanted requests. The only thing that would make this perfect is if they would also run on my Android phone.
- fencepost 11y ago
  uBlock Origin at least runs in Firefox on Android; I rarely use Chrome on it so can't speak to that.
  - nowey 11y ago
    i uninstalled chrome and facebook, replaced with ff and tinfoil. much better battery life. only google apps i have is play music, google and translate (im rooted)
gorhill 11y ago

justuk 11y ago

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 engines (Mozilla), having a legacy business (CNN) etc.

lmorchard 11y ago
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

mdevere 11y ago

The Verge has some interesting long-form from time to time but it's subsidised by endless clickbait and empty 'conversation-starter' content. Not to mention their recent move to close Comments being a cynical strategy to get people using their forums. Realise that's OT but wanted to get it off my chest.

cheshire137 11y ago
What's this about comments? Do their articles not have comments and a form at the bottom anymore?
- mdevere 11y ago
  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.
  - vvanders 11y ago
    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 nearly as much after that.
    - A_COMPUTER 11y ago
      It had been brewing a while, in my opinion. What I was seeing happening was, reasonable people would point out flaws in the article, then a moderator would jump in and argue with the person like they were a child and their points were stupid, escalating the situation and probably now pissing off more people than just the original complainer. I stopped reading their comments because of the moderators. Moderators should be seen and not heard.

Grue3 11y ago

Ah, it's that site that's mostly known for posting inaccurate information about Android and closing off comments because people called them out on it. Why would anyone even go there anymore? They haven't published anything worth reading in ages.

wiremine 11y ago

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 much of a reason to fix it on their own.

otis_inf 11y ago
> 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 competitors are forced to be used less (by Google's own actions) more people might be using Google ad networks.
- _lce0 11y ago
  nah, that wont work. that would surely end up in legal battle, from the ad agencies saying that Google used their monopolistic power on the search industry just to boost their analytics product.
  - roninb 11y ago
    IANAL, but I would think that as long as, algorithmically, Google ensures it's weighing all ads and trackers equally (read: whatever your concept of fairly is) they could prove that it truly is in everyone's benefit. In a similar vein to the aforementioned "Death to Small Businesses Day."
  - yuhong 11y ago
    How about just counting the number of ad trackers?
- fanf2 11y ago

leni536 11y ago

It's kind of funny to open up Verge with both uBlock and uMatrix enabled only allowing only 1st party scripts. First I thought that I have to enable some js to view the article, but then I noticed the small scrollbar and scrolled down. https://imgur.com/a/YVbDE https://imgur.com/a/YVbDE

Lagged2Death 11y ago

...it downloaded 12MB - a little over 7MB in that is JavaScript! 7MB was about the install size of Microsoft Windows 3.0, a complete (if crummy) OS.

wtbob 11y ago

And people laugh at me for disabling JavaScript!

ised 11y ago

"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 of indirection. This dance is not of much consequence in the case of a single name. But in the aggregate, e.g., many names requested from one overloaded site (such as one author singles out) after another, it does add up. This also creates a larger margin for errors (failed lookups getting retried and timing out, again and again... while the user sits and waits).

lmorchard 11y ago
Actually, FWIW, I'm using pairNIC.com for DNS. I do host on Amazon S3, though.
- ised 11y ago
  That means the full lookup for your personal domainname is for an Amazon S3 domainname. PairNIC just handles the first lookup to give the CNAME for blog.lmorchard.com, pointing to Amazon. Then there are multiple other CNAME's that Amazon uses. It is about the same as looking up a Akamai customer domain. Lots of extra DNS queries.

manigandham 11y ago

The problem is shared between publishers and ad networks. Sites are loading up on anything and everything to offset costs and it's only getting worse with adblock. And ad networks are just built with poor engineering and no attention paid to the user's experience. It's too easy to whip up a basic ad server and just load a dozen more tags on a page with the focus being volume and clicks. Unfortunately, there isn't an easy way to fix things because of the way money flows. Disclaimer: I'm the founder of a digital ad network.

devioustree 11y ago

At lot of replies to that Verge article seem to be addressing the click-bait title and not the content. The content is concerned with why an old Macbook (with comparable specs to a new iPhone) will handle the web much better than said iPhone.

lmorchard 11y ago
I need to do more specific digging on this to have a good answer. From the bits I know, mobile browsers offer more conservative support for caching & hardware acceleration. Phones are way more sensitive to battery use & heat than a plugged-in laptop. You can't really directly compare a phone to a laptop, even if they seem to have similar hardware numbers. The form factor & use cases matter.

krstck 11y ago

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. Oh wait....RSS.

nathan_long 11y ago
> 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.

yuhong 11y ago

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.

lmorchard 11y ago
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. Marketers get some analytics on the response to their ads, but not full-on tracking.
- yuhong 11y ago
  Good idea, actually.
- smaudet 11y ago
  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.

Yhippa 11y ago

> Believe it or not, the Content Services team at Mozilla is thinking about way more than just "plunking ads into Firefox". Like, what if we actually accepted the fact that ads are a way of funding the web at large, and browsers themselves offered built-in mechanisms to support advertising that respect privacy & performance? Yeah, that's a bit of a change from browsers' traditional neutrality. But, it could be a better deal for publishers and users together. I'm curious as to how that could ever be done. I feel that it's almost impossible without somehow getting user information. I feel the trend is that ads are going to continue to be tuned to people and aspects about them. Maybe fully homomorphic encryption can do that without violating privacy but that's a long way off. > Here's another idea: Almost a year ago, I heard the notion of "Subscribe 2 Web" at Mozilla. The gist is that you're worth about $6.20 per month across publishers via advertising revenues. What if you paid that much into an account yourself every month and used a mechanism built into your browser to distribute that money? Yeah, it's micropayments, but I find it interesting that these folks came up with a specific dollar amount that doesn't sound terrible. It exists. It's called Contributor by Google: https://www.google.com/contributor/welcome/ https://www.google.com/contributor/welcome/. If anybody needs an invite please let me know.

udkl 11y ago

I concur ... The verge has been out of my feed for a long time .... their site feels 'heavy' and filled with distractions ...