- With Instant Articles, Facebook has not only done a 180 from what Mark Zuckerberg has called the company’s biggest mistake, they’ve now done another lap just to prove a point. Not only is the web not fast enough for apps, it’s not fast enough for text either.
And you know what, they’re right.
A lot of the pain points that come up in this article ring true. I feel like the mobile web has actually regressed in the past couple years. Maybe I am imagining this but I feel like I encounter far more popups and full page adds that are reminiscent of the worst of the 90's web than I ever have on mobile web pages. Complete with impossibly minuscule touch targets to 'x' out of them.
But the native vs. open debate goes far beyond these egregious examples when companies are reacting to user behavior that favors native even in cases of mostly text content.
I've always preferred web properties that are very spartan. Seems to be increasingly lethal to be anything but in many cases.
The article is a sort of unfocused warning of internet DooooOOOoooooom! I'm not wholly convinced. Facebook is one of the largest traffic drivers of the modern web: true. Giving Facebook a monopoly on publishing would be dangerous: true. Facebook Instant is Facebook monopolizing publishing on the mobile web: absolutely false. Every time facebook makes a product a dozen other companies spin off their own version of that product. Sometimes FB's product wins out, sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes they're all wrong. When you drop the hoopla and the fear, I think you're left with one really solid quote:
At the very least, Facebook has put everyone else on notice. Your content better load fast or you’re screwed.
I think you distilled the best quote from the article. What's most interesting about this is the manifestation of tangible gains from shifting from the open web into native applications for content that isn't necessarily even media-heavy. Here's an interesting article that dovetails with the one above: Tools don’t solve the web’s problems, they ARE the proble Why all these tools? I see two related reasons: emulating native, and the fact that people with a server-side background coming to JavaScript development take existing tools because they do not have the training to recognise their drawbacks. Thus, the average web site has become way overtooled, which exacts a price when it comes to speed. That’s the problem. Remove the tools, and we’ll recover speed. He doesn't touch on design and ads to monetize, but by virtue of their absence I'd guess he feels they are secondary and tertiary issues w/regards to the speed tax.The movement toward toolchains and ever more libraries to do ever less useful things has become hysterical, and with every day that passes I’m more happy with my 2006 decision to ignore tools and just carry on. Tools don’t solve problems any more, they have become the problem. There’s just too many of them and they all include an incredible amount of features that you don’t use on your site — but that users are still required to download and execute.
I'll have to give this a look-see when I have more time! My gut is that I don't use a ton of tools at work but there are a buttload of tools that help me not think about the boring parts of web development. Those tools seem great. Libraries I'm kinda in agreement with the quote you posted. But who wants to write their own sign-in code when its been done a million times?!