I swear every mobile site is absolute garbage that runs like ass on phones.
You have to cram everything into a much smaller space while still having the whole thing be usable with much more clumsy touch inputs. Thos are serious limitations.
If 60% of the screen is taken up by some form of ad, that’s a design choice not a technical hurdle.
When you’re developing a site you have to decide whether to have a completely separate site for mobile (which is generally twice as much work for future site updates) or try to make one layout that adapts to both desktop and mobile (which tends to favor one or the other.)
It’s really not that hard to make a single, responsive layout, but these fuckers just love cramming in the most unnecessary bs into their web experience.
And that is what makes it a problem.
The trend when doing web-development since at least 2014 or so is mobile-first responsive design, which is basically as you describe, and it is really not that hard.
You’re right - the only reason that any regular website isn’t performant is usually because it’s chock full of bullshit. Most of the web is unfortunately riddled with a few problems:
- library bloat. The vast majority of developers (even outside of just web) will include a giant library for 1-2 functions instead of just writing it themselves. I don’t really blame them, most of the incentive for development these days has little to do with building things well, but instead focuses on building them quickly. With web dev in particular, it’s extremely common to import a few thousand npm packages from dubious sources.
- on the web especially, everything seems to be running 3-4 different tracker networks, ad tech bullshit, anti-adblock stuff, click/scroll/jackers, etc. I’d hazard a guess that the vast majority of the regular web, the content is less than half of the actual function of the site.
- It’s also extremely common in web dev to use some cool kid toolset designed to recreate photoshop on the web to build a blog or whatever.
JavaScript is incredibly overused, too. Like, you’ll visit this simple site, not much going on at first glance, not much to do besides reading the content. And then you look at uBlock Origin, which tells you the site runs 46 scripts.
For what??
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I think some of the web frameworks people use are converting the desktop site into a mobile layout by applying additional CSS and layers ontop of it that makes it more inefficient.
Ads maybe? Firefox + uBlock Origin might help with some sites that have ads for trackers.
I don’t find that to be true. What device are you using?
For example the mastodon app on iOS sucks ass.