I read all my posts via RSS anyway, so that already cuts down on the cruft; at the same time, I will click through to a page if I want to engage with the site (like leaving comments on BoingBoing BBS), and I feel that I want to help a bit.
That said, I can’t wait for this feature to drop. I am so sick of pages taking ages to load on my phone. This is 2015, dammit.
It’s pretty shocking that web pages render slower on an iphone now than they did in 2007. The most egregious one has got to tor.com. I love that site, but it takes forever to render on a phone and consumes absurd amounts of data in doing it. I don’t even want to guess at what kind of tracking is going wrong there… I don’t see any ads, after all.
Sometimes the “responsive design” and other buzzword-compliant technologies are crammed into the website, resulting in a javascript quagmire that will bog down even the fastest CPU.
The age of CPU/memory lean designs is apparently far in the past.
Sorry, UrbanDaddy, clicktrax, doubleclick, and the rest of the random third parties stealing my data without consent! Why do hospitals have PHI rules, credit card processors have PCI, but advertisers have free reign?
Mobile is the last refuge of these scallywags, especially with Google and Apple traditionally resisting Adblockers and other technology that’s bad for their real money-maker. I’m glad Apple will make it easier, Android needs to step up their game.
If use packet capture and analyze, you’ll see (on some sites) upward of 100 connections to various advertising companies. It’s worse on many mobile apps. Many researchers mistake this as “spying” or persistent data collection. The truth is you aren’t even worth the hard drive space. It’s mostly just demographic information being traded between hot new companies who think they have some kind of statistical magic trick to sell you the next widget.
The funny thing is, a lot of it isn’t nefarious. It’s just a lot of companies jockeying to make a few fractional cents per transaction. (And the NSA hoovers up anything it can, but that’s another story.)
I’m finding for the sites I frequent the RSS feeds are getting sparser and sparser (precisely to drive site traffic I would assume) to the point where my rss reader is largely an aggregator for titles and I need to read the full web site to get more than a few sentences for a story I’m interested in.
bb is no exception to this unfortunately.
It sometimes makes me long for the good old days when JavaScript was a bad word. Now it basically runs the web.
Good old days when webs were handcoded from bottom to top, without extraneous fluff. The loading speed even on a slow line was worth the both ways uphill part.
Today’s kids and their wordpresses and the web2.0 crap that in effect achieves exactly the same just with much MUCH more overhead and vulnerabilities…
Indeed. I proudly coded my web sites in vi and optimized them for lynx and oh god I feel so old now.
I never got truly used to vi, but plaintext it is anyway. No fancy wysiwyg crap that separates you from the true substance. Also never truly optimized for lynx but made sure the site can work with it…
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