The following is an excerpt from Farhad Manjoo | August 21, 2012 | Slate.com |
Every morning I wake up too early, reach for my iPad, and scan the morning’s tech headlines. This is a pathetic enough existence, but the Web sites I frequent aren’t helping. Take the tech-news behemoth TechCrunch, a site that almost always causes my tablet to go haywire. First, slowly, elements load in an order that makes no sense—the body text appears first, then the site’s top and right-side navigation bar shows up, and only then, after many excruciating seconds, does the headline appear. At this point I’m mildly annoyed, but look, the story’s up—so I try to calm down and begin to read. But then, a half second or so after the page loads, the story’s text and headline suddenly disappear. What?! Why would the story appear and then disappear?
If you’re lucky, the disappearance lasts only a second. The story comes back, you figure there’s some kind of bug, and you forgive TechCrunch’s designers, because, hey, when they created their site, they were making something for traditional PCs, and here you are accessing the page on some kind of weirdo tablet. But sometimes you’re not lucky, and the text will flash on, off, and on again, and then the whole site will disappear and you’ll get an advertisement for TechCrunch’s iPad app. In order to read the story you’ve got to click a tiny link dismissing the advertisement. By now you’ve spent nearly 10 seconds waiting for the story, your blood’s boiling, and you’re ready to blackball TechCrunch forever.
But you can’t do that. If you started blackballing sites because they didn’t work very well on the iPad, you’d end up dismissing half the Web. TechCrunch’s mobile experience isn’t great, but it’s not uniquely terrible. From the New York Times to The New Yorker to Google News to Salon and, yes, even Slate, many news sites look and feel kind of crappy when you access them through tablet devices. But it’s not just news sites; even big-time Web operations like Amazon.com don’t look great on the iPad.
For more visit: Slate.com
