You're viewing old version number 3. - Current version

2 min

Verge.com still a bloated mess in Sep 2016

The dumbest story that I read in 2015 was this one.

The article's slant is stunning when considering the author's bio. My emphasis added.

Years later, he became a technology journalist.

Nilay was a co-founder of The Verge and the site's first Managing Editor before taking over as Editor-in-Chief. He also was the acting Managing Editor for the launch of Vox.com.

... SAY Media naming Nilay one of 10 "voices that matter" in technology journalism.

Technology journalism is on life-support.

From the July 2015 Verge article:

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.

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. Apple doesn't allow anyone else to build a new browser engine for the iPhone, so Facebook's Instant Articles is really just Facebook's attempt to sidestep that restriction by building an entirely new content rendering system.

The web and the web browsers for any device are not slow. Websites are slow. Media publishers have created a reader-hostile web. Blaming browsers is ignoring reality. The Verge.com author is living an alternative universe.

No need to rehash

At least the author had a momentary bout of intelligence when he wrote:

And yes, most commercial web pages are overstuffed with extremely complex ad tech, but it's a two-sided argument: we should expect browser vendors to look at the state of the web and push their browsers to perform better, just as we should expect web developers to look at browser performance and trim the fat.

Two-sided argument? Even if web browsers and the phone hardware were able to process unnecessarily bloated web pages quickly, then publishers would simply add more bloat to their pages. And then publishers would complain again about web browsers being slow.

Other fleeting moments of intelligence by the author:

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.

Only some is The Verge's fault. Nope. 100 percent of the slowness is The Verge's fault because it's their website.

From JR's : articles
427 words - 2585 chars - 2 min read
created on
updated on - #
source - versions



A     A     A     A     A

© 2013-2017 JotHut - Online notebook

current date: May 2, 2024 - 3:03 p.m. EDT