The Media War Against the Mobile Web
Neither Samsung, nor Amazon, nor Microsoft, nor BlackBerry could pry the iPad from my hands. But somebody finally did — and you won’t believe who it was.
My ancient white plastic MacBook hadn’t moved once from the teleprompter stand since I bought a first-generation iPad, going on three years now. And even though I’ve owned a speedy iPad with Retina Display since those first came out, I broke down a couple weeks ago and bought myself a new laptop. I still love tablets, and still take mine everywhere, but it’s no longer the go-to device when I’m away from my desk.
Feel free to laugh at me, the guy who had sworn off laptops forever. But before you point and laugh, let me explain why.
The web now sucks on tablets. It just sucks. Because a bunch of media and news companies broke it. On purpose.
It’s as if a bunch of high-level IT guys met in a secret bunker a couple years ago, seething at stupid Steve Jobs and stupid Apple and their stupid iPad. Then they hatched an evil plot to ruin tablet browsing. And they’ve pretty much succeeded.
(The bunker part is fictional; the seething at all things Apple is not.)
A few examples.
Near as I can tell, it started with ABC News. Shortly after the original iPad came out, ABC would no longer let you browse their standard website. Now, there’s no good reason for this, because Mobile Safari is a full-fledged browser that can take anything you throw at it (besides Flash of course), on a screen big enough to navigate. Amongst ABC’s cruelties:
• Their mobile site dropped standard web navigation standards in favor of what one critic (me) calls, “A big flaming pile of doo.”
• No copy’n'paste. Now, ABC News might assume that bloggers (me) might want to use their site for, you know, blogging. And yet through some dark sorcery, they removed the ability to copy text from their stories.
• Nonstandard URLs. So, a smart cookie (me) tried a bypass around the no-copy rule: Copy the URL, mail it to myself, then open it up later on my desktop the next time I’m downstairs at work. But the mobile site uses its own URLs, and they don’t display correctly on your desktop browser. And, no, there’s no simple way to edit the mobile URL to get the “real” URL. “You can’t blog there from here,” is the motto of ABC webmasters.
You might think ABC news is a special case, but no. This kind of mistreatment has become common, especially on news sites where I earn my bread and butter. There’s a service called OnSwipe, which anyone can use to turn their perfectly-functional blog into a Frankenstein’s Creature version of ABC News. And that’s when OnSwipe actually works, which it frequently doesn’t. I won’t name names, but smart bloggers who should know better use OnSwipe — if they’re wondering why I quit linking to them.
Then there’s the Curse of the Official App.
It’s all true and I hate it. If I could blow up the would-you-like-to-use-our-app splashes, I’d do it as public service. Sure, I’d love a hobbled, cobbled version of regular web navigation with loads of limitations. Sigh. And when the YouTube app went away, that’s when agents of darkness cheered.
You are correct that this is intentional, and in fact, within the trade the various web developers are all bragging about how f’ing brilliant they are in ruining the user experience just to make it fractionally harder to access their content w/o seeing their ads (the real purpose).
I think the real correction is going to be when these MSM web developers start seeing how their views tank.
The Youtube thing I’m less sure of, blaming Google directly that is, but the whole War Against Flash is also part of the problem. You can’t access Youtube conveniently on Linux browsers any longer and the few functional programs on Linux that could are fast disappearing.
They are replacing Flash with HTML-5.
There’s no conspiracy. Desk tops and mobile devices are on different platforms (4. Martin). The corporations spend billions on their apps not to frustrate users but to make their displays more “user friendly” i.e. less distorted.
Oh, yeah. It’s so user friendly that I am no longer a user.
It used to work, they broke it. Bye-bye.
Put the article in print mode and copy the selected text there.
More and more sites are breaking the print mode or requiring that you actually print.
Well, it’s an example of Heinlein’s Razor — never presume malice when stupidity is sufficient. Mobile devices, for the good reason that they’re not laptop/desktop computers, have a lot of differences in the way they render, what they can render, and in interaction. There are some good Javascript and CSS combinations that work cleanly across the different platforms, but they do it by limiting what you can do in your page. So what you end up doing is needing to code differently for the different platforms. Then you need different URIs for the different platforms, and then you need to *tell* people how to get to your mobile platform…. But it’s not so much a conspiracy to make the Web unusable on tablets as it is that from the server end you can’t *tell* a tablet from someone’s iPhone The Original.
Should you have a choice? You bet. But for every sophisticated Steve Green there are a hundred unsophisticated Aunt Marthas.
Just so you know, my Aunt Martha teaches web design. My Mother-in-law can’t even print her own directions from Google. The low-info user is out there and very scary.
Charlie, that simply isn’t true. Activate desktop Safari’s developer menu, and you’ll see it can report itself as either iPad or iPhone versions of Mobile Safari. They’re different browsers, and identify themselves as such.
One annoying behavior that PJM’s app does (at least much of the time) is that when I select an article on my iPhone from within the app, it launches a Facebook page (and sometimes another page) on Safari. This is annoying and a waste of bandwidth, especially if I’m trying to read something without a WiFi connection.
Welcome to the wonderful world of the unregulated free market. Just tank your lucky stars that we don’t have regulatory bodies imposing standards like they did with TV. I mean the indignity of being able to watch any channel without having to buy a special TV. Good thing the internet got it right.
Dumbest. Comment. Ever.
Did standards stop the Germans from bombing Pearl Harbor? No!
I thought that movie made money.
Germans at Pearl Harbor? That must mean the Japanese were fighting the Soviets at Stalingrad?
Somebody missed some standards in their history class.
I think somebody else missed their mandatory viewing of Animal House
That will teach me, eh Stephen?
I can copy and paste text without issue oh my Nexus 7 running Android, maybe you should try a non-apple device.
Stephen, you are probably aware, but most are not, that this is still the biggest difference between a Closed OS compute system (like any Apple OS) designed for specific, limited uses and an actual compute-based platform. While tablets are great for most, they are not the enabling engines of computing that were envisioned, so many years ago in the various labs in southern Ca. (HP, Intel etc). Think of yourself as enlightened, just having rediscovered this.
I’ve been in this industry for 25 years, and it’s always the same. New technology is introduced followed by the fun-suckers, killjoys, and control freaks ruining it.
There’s literally no end to the stupidity. Here, if we’re lucky, they’ll (Some) get metrics to show that for hampering access, they kill eyeballs on the site.
Or even that their target market for tablets dries up or levels off. Why in the world would I drop +$500 on a tablet only to have it be a glorified gameboy?
I have that dilemma now, which is leading me to a Nexus. It’s the cheapest.
I’d like an iPad, but for the price and headache I’m thinking a macbook air would be more useful to me.
As for Windows 8 and Surface? They are made for simpletons. Period. The same crowd at the mcdonald’s counter that can’t read or compute and needs to press a picture of a burger to enter your order. They won’t be worth the bargain bin. They’ll be like blackberry.
I’ve been working in the Win8/Visual Studio 2012/Windows Azure environment for the last couple of weeks, and am quickly coming to the conclusion that the Metro interface is nothing short of loathsome. I’m astonished that anyone there actually thought that making everything two dimensional, the removal of borders between functional regions, and common colors between those regions actually was a good idea.
It once again demonstrates, to me, that Microsoft has never employed an artistically competent design person in their entire existence. The idea that UI is meant to enhance and facilitate UX has clearly crossed no one’s minds there.
Ever.
I’m not in the “skeuomorphic all the time everywhere” school. But a certain amount of understanding of how the human mind takes in and processes information is critical in the UI/UX world. Giving the impression of 3 dimensions; using colors and borders to define regions; etc. They’re critical to good design. They take advantage of visual cues that people use, to great advantage. Especially when they can be combined with non-standard UX to enhance the experience.
Metro’s an abomination. It’s going to show pretty quickly on Microsoft’s bottom line. Heads are gonna roll.
Yeah, but it won’t be the one that needs to roll.
Ballmer’s a good operations guy, but he should not be CEO.
Ballmer isn’t even an operations guy. He’s a sales guy.
What typically happens at a company, is the founder have a big idea and build it into a large operation. When the founders retire, eventually the sales guys take over. But instead of having big ideas, the sales guys focus on how to squeeze every last penny out of the old idea, while wasting whatever innovation talents they have on how to protect the old idea from encroachments.
This is HP’s sad story. Apple has — so far — avoided it.
What makes MS so interesting is that it was the founding visionary, Bill Gates, who turned things directly over to the sales guy. It usually takes a corporate generation or two for that to happen.
Reminds me of people on Flickr or Tumblr (god, how I hate those names) who “turn off downloading” (on the latter, of pictures they don’t even own, more often than not).
Or worse, people who try to do so by making right-click pop up an annoying message – because nobody uses right click for “open in a new tab”, right?
So, you made it hard for the casual fan to save a copy of an image (or to use your site at all in the right-click case) … and didn’t even slow down someone who actually wants to steal your work?
People are fools.
(And a second additional hate-fest for Stupid Tumblr Designs that make it almost impossible to even see anything other than a thumbnail. On a picture blog.
Why are you morons even bothering with a pseudo-blog?)
(Contra Sean, that’s ridiculous. Especially when you try to claim “any Apple OS”, not just iOS. The farkin’ kernel for OSX is public, as is the Unix userland.
Oh, no! You can’t rewrite the UI layer and Apple’s various proprietary libraries? Who cares?
You can still write, compile, share, and run any damn software you want. Dev tools are free – including Apple’s graphical environment, the one they use in-house, if you want to write OSX-specific software.
From an “arbitrary computing” standpoint OSX is functionally identical to Linux or *BSD or Solaris [meaning literally that any portable Unix software should run on it just fine, once you install the free Apple-supported X server].
I don’t know what magic “compute based platform” denotes in your world where a Unix system with a free full development environment isn’t one…)
Count me in the camp that says this has more to do with stupidity than anything else. There probably is some element of wanting to force users to see ads, but honestly the better option in that case is to also encourage tablet browsing, where users aren’t apt to go crazy with browser plugins. Frankly the main reason I disable ads on most sites on my desktop is for safety, and on the iPad this is less of a concern. I don’t have a problem with ads that come from a trusted source that aren’t obnoxious, but how is the average Joe supposed to know which sites are safe (and police new ads for malware)? I’ve never had a problem with ads that didn’t suck up my CPU resources or try to induce a seizure.
I’ve seen enough navigation failures on other sites across mobile devices to realize that these problems are probably more closely connected to a lack of awareness of tablet browsing and a lack of suitable test platforms. For instance, one site that’s dedicated to discussing Android apps completely breaks on my Kindle Fire; no way can that be intentional. It breaks because of a way they load the posts in a little sub-window, which is something I’ve seen some Blogspot sites do too, and for all I know it could be the same engine responsible.
Now disabling copy and paste, that’s probably deliberate on ABC’s part, because when it comes to the Web they’re morons. They probably thought that would prevent people from lifting entire articles or something stupid like that. It won’t, and people tend to just quote snippets in the first place if they copy and paste at all.
I’m surprised no one’s created a mobile browser that tells servers it connects to that it’s running off a desktop in order to bypass the subpar mobile sites.
It’s interesting. Desktop Safari has a Developer tab, which has a nifty feature. You can tell it to report itself as iPad or iPhone Safari, and it will also behave accordingly. In that way, developers can see how their websites will look on mobile, without having to leave their desktops. Sadly, Mobile Safari has no such feature to allow you to do just what you said.
They have. The browser I’m using right now, AtomicWeb, allows you to spoof as Default Mobile Safari, iPhone Mobile Safari, iPad Mobile Safari, Safari Desktop, WAP Device, two versions of Firefox, 4 versions of IE, or a custom string. I usually switch over to Firefox whenever I see OnSwipe.
Three questions: 1) Why are you browsing news sites like ABCNEWS? 2) The customer reviews say clicking on an article link in the PJMedia app opens Facebook in Safari. Do you think that is a sin? 3) What laptop did you get?
1) I never, every browse ABC News. I go there when I link I need to follow for work takes me there.
2) That was a problem with PJMedia 1.0, and has been fixed in the latest release. I never encountered the problem myself.
3) A 13″ MacBook Air. The 11″ seemed too small next to my 10″ iPad. But now my 10″ iPad seems too big next to my laptop, so I’ll probably replace it with an 8″ iPad Mini when those get Retina Display in a year or two.
BTW, I’m totally in love with the Air. My last laptop was a 2006 MacBook, which now feels and looks like a giant plastic brick.
You can change or disable the user agent (the reference that a website uses to decide what browser
you are using) with the app “user agent browser”. With that, you can have your iPad tell the website that you are a desktop computer running the Opera browser if you wish. Disable all the crap…
I’m downloading it now. Thanks for the tip.
This comment at 14 seems like the better response to comment at 6… a centralized standard would either decide that there wasn’t a problem, or that we needed more web pages that loaded crappily.
Here someone has made a solution to it.
My Nook Color has a desktop browser mode which I have always used because I just never liked the mobile browser mode. Some things are better with the mobile, but most I prefer with the desktop mode, so generally I just leave it set on that.
I still do a lot of browsing on my phone and I have to say that I love the option to either “request desktop site” (mobile Chrome) or use a different user string (Dolphin browser). It usually gets around the heavy-handedness that you’re describing.
That said, I actually like it when websites try to accommodate mobile browsing. Some of them actually do quite a good job of reformatting the content so I’m not always pinching and zooming or scrolling. I agree with you on apps. There’s no reason you need to create a custom app just to show your web content. My sites use a couple of options that reformat the same content that desktop users see to look-app like (and even allow a home-screen icon on iThings). I consider this the best of all possibilities.
“The first time I surfed the web on a tablet, it was something close to a revelation. I was holding the whole internet right there in my hand, and it responded effortlessly and immediately to my touch.”
True that.
I don’t disagree with anything here but I’m a little surprised that we think that media companies and such are to blame. If you think Apple is free of blame you are naïve, at best. The ‘appification’ of the world is proceeding exactly as they want. The App store is Apple’s magic bullet and has been since the iDevices started gaining traction. The lack of apps is likely the achilles heel of Windows 8 (lord knows it is for RT). We keep getting hard-ons over app counts when everyone with a brain knows that there are probably only a few hundred non-game apps that quality and value necessary to attract a mass audience. So, having 500,000 apps in the app store is only meaningful to the people in the spec wars. Example: I have ESPN Scorecenter on my iPhone. It’s a great must have app. The ESPN app on my iPad is utterly unnecessary. ESPN’s website even has a touch friendly tablet mode that works awesome in Safari. Engadget’s app is another example where it just feels unnecessary on the iPad. I’m guessing I need to get the National Review app because their website is becoming utterly unusable on the iPad (never mind IE, since I’m forbidden to have Chrome on my work laptop). But again, this is what Apple (and Google) want. I don’t know that Microsoft ‘wants it’ but feel like they have to play the game even though they’d probably be smart to start counter programming against the app centric universe (even though I’m not really sold on HTML 5). The app stores are the competitive advantage and create platform loyalty. So, Apple is thrilled if you feel compelled to download (even a free) app from the app store. I don’t see how this isn’t obvious.
Thanks for the Heads Up. I was thinking about a tablet, and now I’m not.
Someone had to say it. I agree with you that the concept of needing a separate app to interface with each website/service/company was a huge step in the wrong direction. The only application you should need is the browser (Safari, Chrome, Firefox, etc.). This reminds me of the early days of the World Wide Web when the user constantly needed to install some new application or plugin to access a new kind of content. My guess is that over time we will migrate back to using the browser as the primary application on tablets, with dedicated apps reserved only for when they’re truly needed.
The popups and popunders are wrecking things too. These popovers that take ten seconds to fully render on the iPad, and then have little X targets to close…
Come to think of it, the biggest offending website I find on the iPad is National Review–so damn many popunders and popovers that can’t be stopped without shutting down Javascript completely. It cuts my visits down.
I’ve had my iPad 1 for the past two-plus years (and in the World of Jobs, am something of a Luddite for still using it and not upgrading yet). But since about a month after I got the device, I’ve treated Safari about the same way I’ve treated Internet Explorer on my Windows laptop — basically as the Browser of Last Resort. That originally was because the Atomic Web Browser for iPad offered tabbed browsing, while Safari demanded a new page for every link clicked, but Atomic also has the option mentioned above of identifying itself as everything from Safari desktop to IE 9 to Firefox 15. It’s the best way to force websites to open without defaulting to their mobile models, and just in case the browser has a problem with a particular site that forces it to shut down, I have the Opera browser for iPad downloaded as a second or third option (as with IE on a desktop, there are some places you go on an iPad that demand you at least initially use Safari, so you can never completely abandon its use).
“The first time I surfed the web on a tablet, it was something close to a revelation. I was holding the whole internet right there in my hand, and it responded effortlessly and immediately to my touch.”
This was the reaction I had with my first android (droid 1) phone… and I looked at my wife and said “I give you … the internet” in the way that they said it on IT crowd.