Here’s a new iPhone Safari wish-item that will never come to fruition.
The secret to happy iPhone browsing is to shut off javascript. Pages load faster, crashes are nonexistent. Go ahead and try it, I’ll wait for you here.
/waits
… and in our AJAX-happy, javascripty web twopointohyeah world, you’ll be cruising happy for about ten minutes before you hit a site that simply won’t work. Hell, I’ve written a couple myself.
The irritating thing is that a lot of these crash-prone sites are simple news sites, with no apparent javascript processing at all. This leads me to believe that the culprit is badly-written statistics and tracking software.
My solution is a preference which would terminate scripts that reach a certain processing threshold. “Terminate over-aggressive javascripts.” This would have the side-affect of making some javascript-heavy sites unusable, but those are sites that are already unusable, aren’t they?
Wishful thinking, though. Apple usually choose to not be in the business of fixing other people’s stupidity, preferring instead to advise users not to use sites or services that are badly written. And it’s a credo that I agree with. It’s just frustrating to see this problem infect online newspapers, which ought to be among the cleanest, simplest pages on the web.
