Everyone needs to just calm the f*** down.
It what can only be described as hilariously ironic, here’s Nilay Patel of The Verge on the slow web:
Now, I happen to work a media company, and I happen to run a website that can be bloated and slow. Some of this is our fault: The Verge is ultra-complicated, we have huge images, and we serve ads from our own direct sales and a variety of programmatic networks. Our video player is annoying. (I swear a better one is coming, for real this time.) We could do a lot of things to make our site load faster, and we’re doing them. We’re also launch partners with Apple News, and will eventually deliver Facebook Instant Articles. We have to do all these things; the reality of the broken mobile web is the reality in which we live.
And okay. Fair enough: Patel admits that The Verge has some serious crap on their site. But the next quote is a kicker:
But we can’t fix the performance of Mobile Safari. Apple totally forbids other companies from developing alternative web rendering engines for the iPhone, so there’s no competition for better performance, and no incentive for Apple to invest heavily in Safari development. In many ways, Safari is the new Internet Explorer.
Could Safari be a little bit more open to the “open web” stuff we’ve been hearing about? Sure. Of course. But let me be clear: this isn’t Mobile Safari’s fault. This is The Verge’s fault. And it’s iMore’s fault. These companies have become enslaved by terrible JavaScript ads and otherwise website bloatware. As Don Melton so eloquently put it on this week’s Debug (and on many other episodes as well): “Everyone needs to just calm the f**k down.”
How can Nilay expect anything to get better when it’s his website that sucks at loading quickly? Contrary to what he suggests, Apple making Mobile Safari as performant as Desktop Safari won’t fix this.