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Comment by cellularmitosis | Hacker News Reader

Ugh. Dear intarweb, please stop trying to outsmart safari on iOS. It works just fine as-is. We don't need your fancy-pants JavaScript-based paging implementations.

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That's Onswipe, a company founded on the idea that mobile websites should consume as much CPU, RAM, and network resources as possible, because your time isn't valuable, your battery is overcharged, and you have unlimited bandwidth.

You forgot causing safari to crash.

An anti-pattern I've noticed recently for "mobile aware" sites is this: on your mobile device you visit a URL for some page on a site, that site recognizes you are using a mobile browser and then completely unhelpfully redirects you to the main-page of the mobile version of the site. Considering that most mobile devices made in the last 3 years or so are fairly capable of producing a decent experience rendering a "desktop" version of a web-page this behavior is decidedly annoying and generally worse than just doing nothing.

It is so annoying xkcd did a comic on it: http://xkcd.com/869/

I just looked at the requests using Web Inspector on Safari.

iPhone user agent: 37 seconds load time, 1.31MB transferred 93 network requests. Desktop user agent: 15 seconds load time, 839KB transferred, 130 network requests.

… WHY?!

There's an atrocious WordPress theme for iPad out there too. The iPhone one is okay though. Apparently some WP installs default to those mobile versions when browsed from iOS, and I'm pretty sure that some blog writers are unaware of it as I can't see for the life of me some of them actually putting that crap down their readers throat.

I'm avoiding web-sites that do this. Some of them actually exactly reenact this cartoon:

http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/server_attention_span.png

Easy to read view of the article http://viewtext.org/article?url=http%3a%2f%2fwww.geek.com%2f...

I didn't know what you were talking about at first, as I viewed the link from inside the news:yc app and it gave me the normal site page.

Hit the "open in Safari" button and then your complaint became crystal clear,

So awful, when the iPhone renders the normal page just fine.

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