Tag: web

Google concedes the open web is in “rapid decline”

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From In court filing, Google concedes the open web is in “rapid decline”:

If the increasingly AI-heavy open web isn't worth advertisers' attention, is it really right to claim the web is thriving as Google so often does? Google's filing may simply be admitting to what we all know: the open web is supported by advertising, and ads increasingly can't pay the bills. And is that a thriving web? Not unless you count AI slop.

No matter how Google spins this in a very narrow sense, it’s very concerning to see how quickly AI generated content is drowning out content on the web. Feels like Facebook and other companies integrating AI into their posting tools are only hastening the demise of their platforms.

Apple Maps on the Web

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Yesterday, Apple announced that Apple Maps is now in beta for all to use on the web. By visiting the intuitively named https://beta.maps.apple.com URL, users can get most of the functionality that one could by using the native apps. It’s only available on a subset of browsers (Safari/Edge/Chrome on Mac, Edge/Chrome on Windows and Safari on iPad), the performance is kind of hit or miss, and some of the functionality is missing at the moment. However, the announcement mentions that there’s a roadmap to bringing more browsers into the fold as well as adding more functionality.

While I don’t anticipate this is going to put Google out of business any time soon, I’m hopeful that this does a few things. First, having this available on the web will hopefully drive more visibility into the hit-or-miss nature of some of the POI data on Apple Maps. I’m crossing my fingers that we see an improvement in the quality of data on the platform. Second, I want this to see this trend of Apple opening things up continue – even if some of it is mandated by courts. Third, competition is almost always a good thing. Giving users another choice beyond Google Maps should push both companies to improve their products.

Almost everything on computers is perceptually slower than it was in 1983

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From @gravislizard on Twitter:

one of the things that makes me steaming mad is how the entire field of web apps ignores 100% of learned lessons from desktop apps

While the delivery is a bit too get-off-my-lawn for my tastes, this twitter thread by @gravislizard has a lot of points I agree with. For someone that makes a living on the web UI side of things, even I can admit that most web user interfaces these days are brittle, unintuitive and slow.

Everything That’s Wrong With the Web

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From Jeremy Keith:

It’s funny, but I take almost the opposite view that Nilay puts forth in his original article. Instead of thinking “Oh, why won’t these awful browsers improve to be better at delivering our websites?”, I tend to think “Oh, why won’t these awful websites improve to be better at taking advantage of our browsers?” After all, it doesn’t seem like that long ago that web browsers on mobile really were awful; incapable of rendering the “real” web, instead only able to deal with WAP.

I’m a little late to the party with this article, but I’m glad to see such pushback against Nilay Patel’s ridiculous article about mobile web browsers being responsible for bad performance.  While there are always performance and UX/UI gains to me made in Safari and Chrome, I think anyone with even a basic understanding of how web browser performance works knows that throwing 200+ http requests at any browser is not exactly how the web was designed to work. 

Vox Media appears to have a talented group of engineers who understand they’re up against, but this is an arms race (publishers v. end users) that’s not going to end well for any of us if things continue down the path we are on. By adding more and more intrusive tracking, larger imagery and gimmicky article formats that don’t focus on good user experience but rather increasing time in site. It’s as if our friends at the Verge have decided they’re going to go all-in on user hostile behavior and even try to pin it on the browser vendors. 

I used to think Patel was a good writer. He’s a smart guy but I feel like he’s been corrupted in the search for the almighty page view. Maybe that’s giving him more credit than he deserves, but I find myself thinking “here we go again” when I see his name in the byline.