Jeremy Keith, writing at Adactio:

Ask anyone about their experience of using websites on their mobile device. They’ll tell you plenty of stories of how badly it sucks.

It doesn’t matter that the web is the perfect medium for just-in-time delivery of information. It doesn’t matter that web browsers can now do just about everything that native apps can do.

In many ways, I wish this were a technical problem. At least then we could lobby for some technical advancement that would fix this situation.

But this is not a technical problem. This is a people problem. Specifically, the people who make websites.

There are mobile web proponents who are in denial about this state of affairs, who seek to place the blame at Apple’s feet for the fact that WebKit is the only rendering engine available on iOS. But WebKit’s limitations have nothing to do with the reasons so many websites suck when experienced on mobile devices. The mobile web sucks just as bad on Android. Apple’s WebKit-only rule on iOS is just a useful scapegoat for the fact that most websites, as experienced on phones, are designed and engineered to suck. It’s not whatever features WebKit lacks that Chrome-myopic web developers want. It’s all the crap that web developers add — tens of megabytes of JavaScript libraries and frameworks; pop-ups and pop-overs all over the screen; scrolljacking and other deliberate breakage of built-in UI behavior — that makes the experience suck. We should be so lucky if the biggest problems facing the web experience on iPhones were the technical limitations of WebKit.

And the app experiences from the same companies (whose websites suck on mobile) are much better. Not a little better, but a lot better — as I wrote in a piece in January. The truth hurts, just like the experience of using most websites on mobile.