Friday 10 January 2014

www.engadget.com - ouch

Engadget is - or was - one of my favorite tech web sites. Until recently.
It has up to date news, and is a great "first-hit" of the day web site.

But they have changed it and broken it - badly. It hurts my laptop and
hurts my mobile. There is too much data and too many images on the page
and am having to resort heavily to adblocking it. On my laptop, the Vine
adverts/videos are causing my CPUs to go into overdrive, and Firefox is
severely broken - when its using 25% of 8 cpus (i.e. using 100% of two
cpus) when the page is not loaded, or even after closing. Firefox is
a very poor resource hog. But engadget has decided to not only put
3x the number of headlines on the front page, and replicated all the
images in big and small sizes, and added videos, but the mobile site
just goes to the desktop site.

They are basically being scornful of resource usage, no matter how they
access it.

So, alas, goodbye engadget as my goto page.

Instead, I welcome news.ycombinator.com - just text, lots of really
interesting headlines, and loads immediately (unlike the javascript/css
heavy slashdot, which is also too heavyweight).

People, please remember that there are lots of times that a high
bandwidth connection is not available.

Whilst I am at it, I will give a thumbs up to "Taptu" - which I use
on Android and iOS - which allows for offline reading.

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