The Web is not Poor Man’s Native

Of course, the web development model also has its own set of challenges. In particular, there is a huge over-indulgence in trackers today, and this can wildly impact responsiveness. If you run a plugin like Ghostery for a while, you’ll quickly learn just HOW prevalent add-ins like this are. In a quick tour around common news sites, for example, I found the AVERAGE number of external tracking libraries being loaded to be more than twenty.

In Progress

Yup. When I worked at Abt Electronics, I was abhorred by the requests to add a new “tracking pixel” every few weeks. We had dozens of them on our site. A simple look under the hood showed quite clearly that the performance was hurt severely by these tracking scripts. Bringing this to the attention of an apathetic employer made me realize how bad the problem is. Marketing wants to track visitors and will not listen to developers that these things hurt the visitors they want to track. This is even more an issue with mobile networks that, even with 4G LTE, are significantly slower and more lossy than broadband.

If we simplified our webpages, stopped trying to emulate native, and stopped bloating them up with unneeded network requests, we’d have a much faster web experience than native (when considering finding and downloading of a native app).