The mobile web sucks

[Commentary] The web browsers on phones are terrible. They are an abomination of bad user experience, poor performance, and overall disdain for the open web that kicked off the modern tech revolution. Mobile Safari on my iPhone 6 Plus is a slow, buggy, crashy affair, starved for the phone's paltry 1GB of memory and unable to rotate from portrait to landscape without suffering an emotional crisis. Chrome on my various Android devices feels entirely outclassed at times, a country mouse lost in the big city, waiting to be mugged by the first remnant ad with a redirect loop and something to prove.

Apple totally forbids other companies from developing alternative web rendering engines for the iPhone, so there's no competition for better performance, and no incentive for Apple to invest heavily in Safari development. In many ways, Safari is the new Internet Explorer. Things are mildly more open on Android, but not much -- and Google has Mozilla in some sort of hypnotic foundation-grant-and-search-revenue trance anyway, so it's not clear where the competition would come from. That's a recipe for stagnation, and stagnation is what we have. It's leading powerful players like Apple and Facebook to create ersatz copies of the web inside their walled gardens, when what we really need is a more powerful, more robust web.