I hate browsing the web on my phone. I do it all the time, of course — we all do.
But man, the web browsers on phones are terrible. They are an abomination of bad user experience, poor performance, and overall disdain for the open web that kicked off the modern tech revolution.
Here's a different perspective on the problem. It's not that the browsers are terrible, the web pages are terrible.
I don't understand the author's connection between Safari being crashy on iOS 8 and an assault on the Mobile Web. For years mobile Safari has been absolutely rock solid, and iOS 9 is supposed to be a feature-light release focusing on under the hood technical improvements. It's absolutely true that mobile Safari was buggy as fuck for this iteration of the OS, but to me (and the general techosphere as far as I can tell) that's been an anomaly. I have the same phone and it swaps to landscape effortlessly with more tabs open than I can bring myself to sit through closing. This kind of stuff just happens in development sometimes. The stuff about Facebook Instant and Apple News is actually salient to his point. Unfortunately for open web standards, speed matters and people vote with their attention, which materially drops off a lot quicker than most would guess in the aggregate. I don't think the open web is going anywhere at all but people simply prefer native apps in many cases. Not only are they more performant, but their narrower and simplified UX is a boon for many types of content consumers. Especially with small mobile devices that lack a laptop's memory capacity and have to be mindful of battery usage, mobile browsers can't simply say "yes" to every open standard, -especially the ones that open up memory to web apps. Mobile devices simply don't have the headroom to forgive inefficient code compared to the laptop.
I'd argue that Apple devices simply don't have the necessary RAM to support better browsers. Android devices are starting to come with 3 and 4 GB of memory this year. If you can run a modern desktop browser on worse hardware, then Apple has no excuse.Mobile devices simply don't have the headroom to forgive inefficient code compared to the laptop.
My general take is that Apple doesn't need as much RAM as they are better at memory management both in their code and in their rules and allowances for 3rd party devs. Even beyond the iPhone they have a history of being able to do much more with less. That being said, I absolutely agree that at this moment in time they're running up against a wall. I think they're going to give a RAM bump either on the 's' iteration later this year of for sure on the 7 next year. I'd just be awfully surprised if that doesn't happen.
I think it's true that Apple generally do better with less RAM, but in the case of web browsing its basically inevitable that you'll use a large amount of RAM, and the more you have, the better the performance. At any rate, I haven't had any issues with web browsing at all on a Moto X 2014 with 2GB RAM.