With the content-blocking features of the new iOS Safari, the load-time of popular Apple website iMore is reduced from 11 seconds to just 2 seconds.
Now, this was fun little project to mess around with, but it does give me a moral dilemma. Do I care more about my privacy, time, device battery life & data usage or do I care more about the content creators of sites I visit to be able to monetise effectively and ultimately keep creating content?
Tough question.
John Gruber provides the straight answer: "a reckoning is coming."
It's not just the download size, long initial page load time, and the ads that cover valuable screen real estate as fixed elements. The fact that these JavaScript trackers hit the network for a full-minute after the page has completely loaded is downright criminal. Advertising should have minimal effect on page load times and device battery life. Advertising should be respectful of the user's time, attention, and battery life. The industry has gluttonously gone the other way. iMore is not the exception — they're the norm. 10+ MB page sizes, minute-long network access, third-party networks tracking you across unrelated websites — those things are all par for the course today, even when serving pages to mobile devices. Even on a site like iMore, staffed by good people who truly have deep respect for their readers.
