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Mobile is getting worse, IMO.

Maybe it's because I have an older iOS device running 6.1, but the insane size of some of these sites combined with all the side-loaded javascript and CSS rendering (and re-rendering) is just making sites completely unusable.

How come I can load Metafilter in 3 seconds, but Wired takes over a minute, if it works at all? And Medium? Even worse.

OMG this. It's insanely frustrating that 90% of the time we're just reading text and it's so painful on older mobile devices that still should run circles around computers that happily consumed internet content ~10 years ago.

The web used to provide text, and allow the user-agent to render it as appropriate for that display/user.

Now the web is a (bad) application platform, where the content designers demand full control of interactivity.

As a user you are not well-served by the modern web. It's not the devices per se it's also the content that is different than ~10 years ago.

As the border between mobile/portable devices and dektops/workstations keeps getting blurrier, this "on mobile" concept will probably just lose any sense in the near future.

Probably not. In my experience I've found that images are usually higher res (and bigger file sizes) that on mobile devices.