We are entering a new era for the Internet — a pessimistic one. You don’t have to take my word for it. A spate of recent thinkpieces paint a picture of the current state of the web: it sucks.
Let’s start with web pages. Web pages suck. (Ben Thompson, Stratechery)
They are bloated with ads and download sizes are simply ridiculous, but publishers can’t help it. Ads are now run through ad networks, so the people making the content don’t have control over their own monetization anymore.
Of course, if you have even a tiny bit of tech savvy you already have AdBlock installed, which cost publishers $22 billion in 2015. This only makes the problem worse, since they need more ads to compensate.
The mobile web also sucks. (Nilay Patel, The Verge) Yes, desktop pages may be bloated, but they feel light and airy in comparison to their mobile counterparts.
“[T]he 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.” Blame Apple. They dominate the mobile browsing market, but their product is potato quality.
The struggle to build functional web apps has led more developers to turn to…
