• Jan 2015 update
• Feb 2015 Update
• Mar 2015
• Curl
• Apr 2015
• Apr 28, 2015
• May 12, 2015
• May 26, 2015
• July 2015

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15 min

Breaking the web in 2014 - 2015

More site owners are offending the web with their effed-up, bloated javascript-heavy constructions.

These ill-conceived content sites do not provide users with a simple and enjoyable reading experience.

Site developers misuse modern browser technologies in order to show off their alleged technical prowess to their like-minded, dorky web offenders.

The other problem, especially for professional content media sites, are the number of trackers and other gobbledygook that gets downloaded to a user's browser, which severely slows down the page load time.

Many so-called new-and-improved web designs bog down older desktop/laptop computers. The JavaScript, the trackers, etc. devour the older CPUs. It's suppose to be a web page with content and not a video game.

We might be better off if we designed sites with minimal HTML and minimal responsive design, creating what might be called responsible design.

A few suggestions:

Try designing the site without javascript, or test the site with javascript disabled, and ensure that the site still works with progressive enhancement.

Limit the use of giant images.

Make every image count. Don't use an image just because it looks cool when it has nothing to do with the rest of the content.

Don't break the back button.

Don't break the Ctrl-C and Ctrl-V for copy and paste for desktop/laptop users.

Don't create confusing and unfamiliar click/touch actions on links and navigation.

If you can't control yourself, then create a frigging native app instead of blanking up the web.

This might make web development boring, but the focus, however, should be on the content and not nifty animations.

Maybe this is how content providers can charge a fee for their content by offering the plain, simple, usable version of their site for a price. The free users get deluged with the bloated, ad-heavy, so-called sophisticated, modern version.

I understand that geeks like to incorporate their new skills into new and existing projects, but the hip tech-of-the-day should still provide value to the end users.

Too much of this new stuff seems like a solution in need of a problem. Geeks cannot find enough problems to solve with the new tech, so they create new problems by unnecessarily gumming up the works on web sites that did not have problems.

The web experience is becoming increasingly frustrating. Sites that once worked fine by my standards are now becoming so annoying that I may stop reading them, or I'll read their content only if it's provided in an RSS feed that I can view within my site here.

On my older laptop, I use Firefox with the NoScript plug-in, so that by default, I view every website with JavaScript disabled. This speeds up page load time dramatically.

Through the NoScript plug-in, I can enable some or all scripts for the page or the entire site either temporarily or indefinitely. The control is more with me.

For sites that fail to work without JavaScript, I will either enable JS if I like the site, as with Medium.com, or I simply move on, since it's the World Wide Web.

On mobile, however, I primarily use the Safari browser on my iPhone with JS enabled. By mobile, I mean my phone, since I no longer use a tablet. I read for long periods on my iPhone.

Well-designed sites are typically responsively-designed, so they function fine on my smartphone, although I wish designers would trend toward a larger font size for the phone.

In recent years, the font size and line-height have increased for the desktop/laptop versions of websites. But in my opinion, some responsively-designed sites use a font size that is too small for the phone.

When viewing some websites on my laptop, I resize my browser to get the "mobile" version of the responsively-designed site because it functions and looks better than the full-size version.

On my phone, I have little patience for web sites that are not responsively-designed. It's nearly 2015, and thankfully, I'm encountering non-responsive sites less often.

I have no idea why news.ycombinator.com refuses to make the slight changes to enable the site to display well on a smartphone. Among sites that I visit regularly, Hacker News is about the only non-responsively-designed site that I tolerate on the phone.

Jan 2015 update

http://www.sitepoint.com/average-page-weight-increases-15-2014/

https://gigaom.com/2014/12/29/the-overweight-web-average-web-page-size-is-up-15-in-2014/

Bloated CNN design. It took so long to load on my iPhone 5 that I gave up.
https://news.layervault.com/stories/41293-cnns-redesign-finally-for-public

Feb 2015 Update

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8983158

http://motherfuckingwebsite.com

https://medium.com/@codepo8/the-web-application-myth-69c6b1506515

Mar 2015

Pinterest website is a web abuser while simply viewing the site as a browsing-only user.
https://www.pinterest.com/evanka/knitting-loom-crochet-and-anything-yarn/

Twitter's website is a web abuser on the desktop/lapop and on the phone. Unacceptable back-button usage. Can't open page in the background on the phone. Can't copy text with JavaScript disabled. Infuriating.

Hilariously stupid that such huge properties fail at basic web design that existed more than 20 years ago. No matter. I don't need these properties. It's a "world wide" web.

This web page about tablet weaving is superior in design compared to what Twitter and Pinterest creates. That's because this tablet weaving page is more aligned with the true spirit of the web.

http://www.shelaghlewins.com/tablet_weaving/TW01/TW01.htm

Curl

http://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2015/03/20/curl-17-years-old-today/

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9236551

HN comments:

> "If it doesn't load through curl, it's broken." --someone
So, so true. Thanks, curl.

---

That's pretty much my own test for a Web based API - if I can drive it from the command line using curl then great, if I can't then it's broken.

---

I wasn't saying not to do the fancy stuff but rather to start with something which degrades well and then have your JavaScript enhance that basic experience. If you want to know why this is a good idea, you should start using something like getsentry.com or errorception.com to record your JavaScript errors.

---

I've been using websites since the early 90s and this pro-single-page sentiment is getting really tiresome. You are breaking the web. You are destroying users' security. Sure, there are plenty of reasons to use JavaScript, and plenty of places where it's appropriate. It probably is a good idea for games and so forth. But requiring users to load and execute constantly-changing code from across the web in order to read a page or submit a form is in-friggin-sane.

Some one else pointed out that it'd be nice if browsers offered more support for things that certain types of developers clearly want to do. I completely agree; it'd definitely be nice to take advantage of many of the technologies which currently exist to do more, in a more structured way. But requiring code execution in order to read data is madness.

http://chase-seibert.github.io/blog/2014/05/30/rich-client-side-web-apps-gone-too-far.html

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9282744

Apr 2015

I tried to read a story at usatoday.com, using the Firefox browser with the NoScripts plug-in. Even with everything temporarily enabled for the page/site, the site functions horribly. It's an appalling UI/UX. Wow. People get paid to produce web-abusive sites. A 1995-designed site would also be superior to this usatoday.com train wreck. Amazing.

HN Thread : Please stop making infinite scrolling websites

I'm not a fan of the infinite scroll. Depending upon its implementation, it provides a clunky and confusing user experience, and the back button can be broken because clicking away and then going back may place the user at the top of the site. That's annoying after scrolling down several "pages."

Some services make more sense to use infinite scrolling, but I think that most of the time, the simple "Older" and "Newer" links work fine.

Apr 28, 2015

More web abuse.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9455315

Random question: How do I stop videos from auto starting on Bloomberg? I'm running Safari with no Flash, and have Ad-block on. Video doesn't start, but audio does. Super Annoying.

It's another web trend I don't understand. All news websites seem to do it, it's super obnoxious, and I don't know anybody who doesn't just rush to click stop as soon as they click the page.

What works for me in Chrome is to disable plugins by default. It seems to work universally, including for Bloomberg.

It's amazing and tremendously annoying how many abusive websites launch a new browser tab when I click a link. Frigging morons. If I wanted to launch the page under the link in a new tab, then I would right click on the laptop or open in the background on the phone.

It's equally annoying and maybe worse when websites DISABLE the right click or open in the background option. These sites with their bloated, silly-ass JavaScript implementation are Grade-A web abusers.

http://qz.com - stunningly abusive when JavaScript is disabled. For their notes, not their articles. Clicks don't work at all in any fashion. On the laptop, I get the hand icon for a clickable link, but nothing works. Wow. This site should be added to some kind of watch list. Even with JS enabled, their notes work abnormally when clicked. I don't see the need for the fanciness. Article links work normally.

May 12, 2015

Another wretched, web-abusive pile of steaming crap:
http://m.toledonewsnow.com/toledonewsnow/index.htm

On the phone, can't open an article page in the background with Safari.

After done reading an article and hitting the back button, the site places me back at the top of the site which is infuriating after I had scrolled down a long ways to read the article.

Unbelievable how people pay for this kind of development. Do they test it? How is this acceptable?

Revolting. Sites like this are harmful to the web.

May 26, 2015

http://www.quirksmode.org/blog/archives/2015/05/web_vs_native_l.html

July 2015

http://www.mondaynote.com/2015/07/13/news-sites-are-fatter-and-slower-than-ever/

http://arnoldit.com/wordpress/2015/07/14/page-load-speed-let-us-blame-those-in-suits/

http://adamsilver.io/articles/the-disadvantages-of-single-page-applications/

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9879685

http://blog.venanti.us/web-app-2015/

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9865338

https://www.designernews.co/stories/52124-web-design-trends-that-ruin-the-user-experience

https://stratechery.com/2015/why-web-pages-suck/ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9891927

I think there's too much blame being placed on programmatic advertising. That's no excuse for 14MB pages, fixed position ads, trackers pinging the network for a full minute, etc.

http://webpagetest.org

John Gruber had strong words about Apple news site iMore:
I love iMore. I think they’re the best staff covering Apple today, and their content is great. But count me in with Nick Heer — their website is shit-ass. Rene Ritchie’s response acknowledges the problem, but a web page like that — Rene’s 537-word all-text response — should not weigh 14 MB.1.
It’s not just the download size, long initial page load time, and the ads that cover valuable screen real estate as fixed elements. The fact that these JavaScript trackers hit the network for a full-minute after the page has completed loaded is downright criminal. Advertising should have minimal effect on page load times and device battery life. Advertising should be respectful of the user’s time, attention, and battery life. The industry has gluttonously gone the other way. iMore is not the exception — they’re the norm. 10+ MB page sizes, minute-long network access, third-party networks tracking you across unrelated websites — those things are all par for the course today, even when serving pages to mobile devices. Even on a site like iMore, staffed by good people who truly have deep respect for their readers.

http://pxlnv.com/linklog/safari-content-blockers-shit-ass-websites/

Ghostery, NoScript, or JavaScript disabled for select domains or for all domains helps speed up the web.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9897306 -- http://developer.telerik.com/featured/the-webs-cruft-problem/

http://www.businessinsider.com/snapchat-twitter-facebook-the-future-of-news-2015-5?op=1

http://www.mondaynote.com/2015/07/20/20-home-pages-500-trackers-loaded-%E2%80%A8media-succumbs-to-monitoring-frenzy/

http://www.theguardian.com/media/2015/jul/19/ad-tech-online-experience-facebook-apple-news

http://fortune.com/2015/07/21/publishers-advertising-problem/

This is hilarious and extremely ironic: http://www.theverge.com/2015/7/20/9002721/the-mobile-web-sucks

I hate browsing the web on my phone. I do it all the time, of course — we all do. But man, the web browsers on phones are terrible. They are an abomination of bad user experience, poor performance, and overall disdain for the open web that kicked off the modern tech revolution.

I disagree. The problem is not with the mobile web browsers. The problem is with the WEB SITES.

Web sites are an "abomination of bad user experience, poor performance, and overall disdain for the open web."

And the Verge.com is one example of a web-abusive site. It's home page is horribly slow-loading thanks to way too many useless images and probably javascript. With javascript disabled, the site's home page loads significantly faster.

These bloated websites require users to have brand new computers with the latest, fastest CPUs.

Mobile Safari on my iPhone 6 Plus is a slow, buggy, crashy affair, starved for the phone's paltry 1GB of memory and unable to rotate from portrait to landscape without suffering an emotional crisis.

I've never had remotely close to those problems in the 12 months that I've been using my iPhone 5C. I'm still using iOS 7.

Chrome on my various Android devices feels entirely outclassed at times, a country mouse lost in the big city, waiting to be mugged by the first remnant ad with a redirect loop and something to prove.

Um, okay. This person is not a writer.

And I've not had an issues with the Chrome browser on my iPhone. I like the fact that the browser has defaulted to the fast, smooth scroll when viewing websites. Maybe this will be the default for all mobile browsers someday. Then we'll have no need to design a website with the special CSS to make fast, smooth scroll occur. That CSS munges up other functionality within a mobile browser, like having the top and bottom sections of the browser disappear or shrink when scrolling.

Granted, this is only theverge.com, and maybe that's why this article lacks intelligent thinking.

The overall state of the mobile web is so bad that tech companies have convinced media companies to publish on alternative platforms designed for better performance on phones.

It's not because of poor mobile browsers and poor phone hardware. It's because of horribly designed websites by media orgs.

So typical. A media company blames someone else.

Way down in that lengthy article, the writer finally states something intelligent.

Now, I happen to work at 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.
We could do a lot of things to make our site load faster, and we're doing them.

Finally, admitting, in a round-about, back-handed way, that it's the media company's fault. And I would say it's 100 percent the media company's fault.

Yet ...

But we can't fix the performance of Mobile Safari.

The writer or theverge.com should design that article page with bare-minimum html, 1995-style, and then load it as a static page and test the load speed on mobile Safari.

Add a meta tag with the viewpoint attribute to make the page read better on the phone. And then add a tiny CSS page with a little formatting and maybe a font-family load and a media query. But keep it focused on something useful.

And test that page load time.

Oh, no JavaScript. Don't need it for a user who is only reading the page.

http://product.voxmedia.com/2015/5/6/8561867/declaring-performance-bankruptcy

Jul 21, 2015 tweet
https://twitter.com/richardpenner/status/623498582805512192

The Verge article blaming browsers for a shitty mobile web is 6MB and has more than 1,000 javascript errors.

Yes, that verge.com article is one of the dumbest things that I have read in 2015.

In my opinion, 100 percent of the blame goes to website developers for creating messes. It's not the fault of the mobile web nor mobile web browsers.

This page loads fine and reads okay on the mobile web. It would read better if the viewpoint attribute was used within a meta tag to make the text display larger on a mobile browser. But as it is, it's still very readable when holding the phone in portrait mode, and the text is larger when the phone is held in landscape mode.
http://motherfuckingwebsite.com

The default font size for the above site when holding the phone in portrait mode is about the same size as many NEW responsively-designed websites that for some idiotic reason use a tiny font size.

It's amazing that RWD websites suck on the mobile web. Not everyone has perfect vision. Not everyone wants to read a ton of tiny text on each line. We don't mind vertical scrolling. Make the font size bigger.

I don't know why many website developers/designers use a smaller font size in their media queries as the screen size gets smaller.

In most cases, I use the same font size for a 320 pixel wide screen as I do for a screen that's larger than 1024 pixels. And sometimes, I increase the font size as the screen gets smaller.

For http://babyutoledo.com/ I use a larger font size than I normally use for both desktop and phone. Sometimes, I think the font size is too big, but on the phone, I like it. Good line-height, good spacing between paragraphs. It's a comfortable reading experience on my iPhone 5c when holding the phone in portrait mode.

It seems that for many web developers, "user comfort" is unimportant.

https://www.designernews.co/stories/53031-stop-using-gratuitous-ui-animation

https://medium.com/@sophie_paxtonUX/stop-gratuitous-ui-animation-9ece9aa9eb97

http://www.vox.com/2015/7/22/9013911/is-the-media-becoming-a-wire-service

https://stratechery.com/2015/why-web-pages-suck/
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9891927

http://arnoldit.com/wordpress/2015/07/14/page-load-speed-let-us-blame-those-in-suits/

http://blog.venanti.us/web-app-2015/
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9865338

https://www.filamentgroup.com/lab/weight-wait.html

http://developer.telerik.com/featured/whats-wrong-with-the-web/

http://product.voxmedia.com/2015/7/22/9013731/we-design-websites-not-mobile-sites

http://www.theguardian.com/media/2015/jul/19/ad-tech-online-experience-facebook-apple-news

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