The Web is broken, but don’t blame apps

The Web is broken, but don’t blame apps

“The Web Is Broken!” has become a familiar theme, with apps generally called out as the bogeyman. We’re in love with the convenience of apps, spending dramatically more time with apps than our web browser on phones. This won’t be without consequence.

As the Wall Street Journal’s Christopher Mims argues, “Underneath all that convenience is something sinister: the end of the very openness that allowed Internet companies to grow into some of the most powerful or important companies of the 21st century.”

But the Web was broken long before apps came along, fractured by poor programming choices of millions of developers.

In other words, apps aren’t the problem. You are.

After all, would we developers gravitate to apps if the Web was keeping up?

By the HTTP Archive’s estimate, Web pages in 2014 bloated by 15% even as connection speeds fell behind, driven largely by overweight CMS templates and frameworks. This is better than the 32% jump in 2013 and the 30% rise in 2012, but it’s still problematic, especially considering that more and more people are accessing the Web through their phones on 3G or LTE connections.

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