The Verge and the "Mobile Web"

The Verge (Nilay) love doing negative, bashing, or downright complaining articles. And the latest addition to this collection is super fun.

Yesterday, the 'hot button' article of Nilay Patel bashing some product (which he enjoys way too much)[I still don't know how he found this tweet] was him stating how iOS's browser is slow, outdated, and more companies should "...push their browsers to perform better." And because Apple's platform is so closed down, no one can innovate and the web sucks.

What followed was a bunch of fun regarding how terrible the Verge's site is when it comes to loading on mobile devices.

For example:

The @Verge’s “the mobile web sucks” article downloaded 5.8 MB of data in Safari. The ad/analytics libraries made rendering take 11 seconds.

— Steve Streza (@SteveStreza) July 20, 2015

Or my personal favorite, after turning off all the content blockers on my browser:

.@SteveStreza @verge Another request just went through and it totaled to 293 requests, 2.7 MB transferred | Finish: 1.9 minutes.

— Kyle (Seth Hug) Gray (@kylesethgray) July 20, 2015

I think Joe Steel summed it up perfectly:

I am disappointed he spilled so much ink only to wind up holding these inconsistent thoughts together like two negative ends of magnets. His site is not remotely streamlined. This rant is 10 MB, kilobytes of which are the actual article, and it’s crammed full of JavaScript and iframes.

It's hilarious when sites like this make complaints about a platform they contribute to and provide content for, and do nothing on their end to help the users. And when you bitch about a problem that your product causes, and want someone to make a engine bigger and more powerful because you're adding on a ton of weight that isn't needed at all, you're the problem. Not WebKit, not the modern web, your crappy site with its 300 requests and 2 minute render time.