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The Mobile Internet Is the Internet (qz.com)
A reader shares a Quartz report: Think back to the mobile phone you had in 2010. It could access the internet, but it wasn't such a great experience. On average, people only spent 20% of their time online on their phones back then, according to Zenith, a media agency. Today, by contrast, we spend around 70% of our time on the internet on phones, based on estimates and forecasts for more than 50 countries covering two-thirds of the world's population. By 2019, Zenith says this will rise to close to 80%. What used to be called "mobile internet" is now just the internet.
It just sucks less. I would still much rather sit in front of my computer if I have the opportunity where I have a much larger screen and a physical keyboard.
I would be interested to see if people are spending that much less time on their computers for internet browsing, or if they are just on the internet more because it's easier now to pull out your mobile phone when you're bored and check your favorite social media sites.
There is one Internet, regardless of what computing device you use to access it.
Oh good, we've rebranded AI, and now we've rebranded social media as "anything with a forum? "
I've been consuming / posting on slashdot for almost 20 years, and I don't and won't ever have an account. How is this social media exactly ?
I had the pleasure of owning the first Android phone, the HTC Dream (T-Mobile G1) when it was a pretty new thing. The five-row keyboard, trackball, and extra hardware buttons basically meant that I had a tiny "laptop" in my pocket. I used it for VNC. I used it for SSH. I even ran a Debian overlay with X on it just because I could. It made the iPhones look stupid: one button, clunky touch-everything, dumbed down trash.
Then the next phone I ended up with had a four-row keyboard and an optical "trackball." OK, it was still quite usable and the optical tracking was admittedly a lot nicer, plus it was less hefty and still a nifty slider phone, with better hardware specs than the Dream had.
Then hardware keyboards on phones were...just gone...and the "mouse" was eliminated entirely, as were physical buttons (in favor of nasty glitchy badly-behaved capacitive touch buttons.) That was where phones went to shit and never recovered. Never mind the app-ocalypse, where the free and open internet was gutted by the use of walled-garden apps, each with their own inconsistent behavior and each requiring its own ever-growing hefty pile of resources on your never-sufficient internal storage.
Apps for big services that have a website are almost always a step backwards and are ALWAYS bloated piles of trash compared to what they should be: a tiny extension for the website to access native phone features that web standards don't exist for. Of course, now we've got standards for most of those too, so why do we still need apps for most things AT ALL? Because Facebook can't mine your damn contacts if they don't have an app, that's why.
Bring back five-row hardware keyboards, slider phones, and optical trackballs. Bring back phones that don't suck and stop shoving apps down our throats.
Zooming causes problems for shitty web developers that hard-code page widths and don't understand the need to allow flexibility in their design process.
I am a web developer, and I would never release a site to the public that can't be zoomed. That's just asking for people to click the close button (because it's the only one they can hit accurately).
I'm more than a bit sickened by the current trend toward non-flexibility in web design. It used to be frowned on to hard-code anything. Now it's frowned on to let your browsers experience any form of flexibility. I take it as a sign than the marketing geniuses that thought ad-slicks translated directly to the web eventually won through sheer corporate culture immobility.
As someone who has been on the internet since even before 300baud acoustically coupled modems. I generally agree with the GPs sentiment. The Eternal September still has not ended. that being said. Things like FB have their place for the masses. I mostly despise ads. If anyone says that ads pay for the internet and if it stopped the internet would wither, I'd say good. The internet was just fine before X10 pioneered pop unders, the internet was vibrant before facebook, the internet used to be a positive thing before ads
You are all cows. Cows say moo. MOOOO! MOOOOOO
MoooOO0OoO00Oo.
Personally I am really impressed with the technology. The capabilities of systems and networks of all shapes and sizes are still a source of amazement. Mobile especially. Tiny pocket sized computers with LTE, gigs of ram, quad core CPUs and GPUs, full HD displays. It's all rather amazing.
Yet here I am wasting all of that potential pretending to be a cow.
For me using a smartphone is like being stuck in a timewarp. So slow and tedious I completely lose track of time. What takes seconds in a laptop or PC takes minutes on a smartphone. It is not devices running slow but rather software and human interfaces that are laughably insufficient.. like frantically trying to suck enough water out of a straw to fill a swimming pool.
Now thanks to mobile all of the Internet is turning into a straw. Massive fonts, giant buttons, zero useful information and endless jackpot scrolling .. perhaps this is the screen that has information relevant to what I want... no let me try the next...nope not that one... ah ha!.....nope... false alarm...