

The iPad’s Dirty Secret - g0atbutt
http://codesketch.com/2010/05/the-ipads-dirty-secret/

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raganwald
I remember that the iPod's dirty secret was that you had to pay big money for
a battery replacement since it wasn't user serviceable. Other dirty secrets
for popular consumer products include things like child labour being used to
build sneakers or unsafe factory/dormitory combinations that kill hundreds of
people when the factories catch fire.

I get the sense that the phrase "dirty secret" is being watered down in the
same sense that the word "evil" is being watered down to simply mean
"something I disagree with."

~~~
g0atbutt
It was meant as a rebuttal to Steve Jobs proclaiming the iPad offers "the best
browsing experience you've ever had" which is simply not true.

While it's true that other "dirty secrets" (some of which you listed) are more
important, it doesn't change the fact that is one of Apple's dirty secrets.

~~~
awolf
To me, "Dirty little secret" implies a factual piece of information that Apple
is knowingly hiding from the public.

"I don't like the iPad browser because it doesn't have tabs." is NOT a "dirty
little secret".

~~~
anigbrowl
Yeah, but 'only 256 mb RAM' might be for a lot of people that have got used to
more.

~~~
anigbrowl
What? It was news to me from reading the article. I had assumed it would have
about the 1gb which is a common spec on $300 netbooks now. I think people are
overreacting a bit to the the title...it's just one of those headline cliches,
like 'anatomy of a flame war'.

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enjo
On a side note: The author makes the assertion that anyone can be tossed an
iPad and figure out the interface on their own... I challenge that assertion.
I've taken a few relatives through the process of getting iPhones up and
running, and I would claim that the interface is more difficult than the
standard desktop metaphor.

At some point an article floated through here suggesting that the iPhone
interface isn't simple. Rather, the author argued, it's the fact that it's
very _fun_ to use that contributes to its success.

I can't find the article right now, but I do agree with the author. The
iPhone/iPad lacks affordances and all sorts of cues about what the hell you're
supposed to DO with the thing. Again, my experience is that folks find it
incredibly unintuitive (although they enjoyed it immensely when they 'got
it').

I recognize my sample size is extremely small. However these constant
assertions that Apple has managed to create an instantly usable and
discoverable user experience are based on even more tenuous science. Does
anyone have any hard data or usability testing they'd like to share? :)

~~~
pedalpete
Donald Norman (founder of Human Interface Group at Apple) once said
[paraphrasing] 'give people something beautiful, and they'll assume it is
simple'.

I can't find the original quote, but he said it again on Canada's BNN a few
weeks ago.

~~~
ahoyhere
It's not quite what he's saying. At least not if you read his book, _Emotional
Design_. There have been research studies that show that beautiful things are
perceived to work better -- after real usage, too, not just "Look at this
picture. How do you think it will work?"

Aesthetics are so very important!

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TheKid
Instapaper solves your reading later problem nicely. I'd give it a try - a
simple bookmarklet and you can read whenever, wherever you want.

~~~
nooneelse
Instapaper is nice and usable, but for this it is also a kludge.

It forces the user to pick ahead of time which things they will and won't want
to read later, instead of the simpler possibility. That being, letting the
user just stop at any point in the interaction, confident in the assumption
that the machine will take care of whatever annoying details are necessary for
the page to still be there when they come back to where they left it.

Having to pick ahead of time isn't all that onerous, so the work-around is a
pretty good one. It also has the benefit that you can pull it up on another
machine, so that is nice. However, that too could be done more simply by
having all of the user's browsers sync the their histories.

~~~
MWinther
Well, in fairness, picking out which pages he wanted to read was one of the
scenarios in the article, so even though your point is valid, Instapaper would
solve that particular part of the problem.

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ihodes
Is this because the iPhone OS doesn't use paging? It seems like this could be
handled from the software side of things: the HD is solid state, and though
sacrificing a second of time to switch to a web page that's been cached in the
HD isn't _Apple-gorgeous_ it's certainly faster and nicer to see than a blank
white page and a twirling loading symbol.

~~~
DrSprout
It's just the problem with the interface design paradigm that says a user
should be able to do anything immediately without instruction. If you want to
cache, you need to have an understanding of how the Internet works, so it's
"too hard" for "most people" to understand or care about.

~~~
ihodes
You're missing my point: the OS should be able to cache the (up to _n_ ) pages
that haven't been explicitly closed by the user in the HD, and when there's a
page fault in main memory when a user tries to access the ones the 256MB can
hold, the OS should go to the disk and grab that page, and swap out another
page that's currently in RAM with the requested page.

Bam, no re-downloading the page. Should be over in under a second (depending
on the memory used in the iPad.)

~~~
weaksauce
If they made an assumption on the usage pattern of the drive they could buy
cheaper parts that were not expected to be used as often. If there is no wear
leveling built into the drive then it could reduce the lifespan of the drive.
I am all for swap but I think they chose to omit the swap space for some other
reason that I cannot think of right now.

~~~
MWinther
The entire device doesn't have to use swap for Safari to save the state of a
particular "tab" to disk.

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thought_alarm
I think most people would like to see page/tab management and caching improved
in mobile Safari. It's hardly a "dirty secret". Depite that, I still love
browsing the web on the iPad. It's like you're flying over your web pages.

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bytebot
This isn't the most well thought out post. I can admit that having only 9 open
tabs is annoying and it uses an arbitrary method of closing previously opened
tabs (or lets call them new windows, because they're not exactly tabs). But I
guess this is something we'll just have to live with.

Instapaper is an app that's about $5. It solves all my offline reading needs
for me. I've never looked back since.

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g0atbutt
The lack of tabs didn't surprise me, but the way the iPad OS poorly handled
memory management did.

~~~
jodrellblank
That's not poorly handled memory management, it's good handling. Poorly
handled would be to give you an out of memory error, or make the other pages
disappear completely as if you'd never opened them at all.

~~~
g0atbutt
I would have to disagree. My Droid also has 256 mb of memory, and I can have
more pages open at once without it having to flush pages. This is still true
with Pandora running in the background.

Overall I'm a fan of the iPad, it just falls short in this area.

~~~
jacquesm
What is the screen resolution of the droid? What is the screen resolution of
the ipad? If there is a big difference then it may be because the software
keeps bitmaps of rendered screens laying around for a quick switch.

~~~
MWinther
The same thing is pretty much true on the iPhone as well. In theory, it keeps
pages in memory, but in my experience it reloads the page way more often than
I would prefer. It is definitely on my wish list for future Safari updates,
once they have consolidated the iPhone OS to have the same version on both
devices.

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tel
I actually love this limitation. My ADD has plummeted and I don't feel like
I'm so much less effective.

~~~
adolph
Yeah, there may be ways to overcome RAM constraints but iPhone OS represents
opinionated computing that apparently values single-tasking on the part of
humans.

Of course, it will value human single-tasking until it no longer does, at
which point Apple will go to great lengths to show how many more tabs iPhone
OS can keep open than other mobile OSes.

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mikecane
Perhaps the thinking behind non-caching is that people will forget to clear
their cache, so why not do it automatically? It might be best to leave that as
a default for people who don't care but offer a cache preference in Settings
for people who know what that is, no?

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jsz0
Breaking old habits is hard but sometimes worth it. Is opening a bunch of
background tabs a really efficient way of doing things? On a PC it works if
you have a high enough resolution to display all the open tabs and enough
RAM/CPU to quickly switch between them. On mobile devices it pays to focus on
more efficient ways of doing things because you're dealing with limited
resolution, potentially slower 3G networks, limited CPU/RAM/battery, etc. That
being said there _are_ browsers on the App Store that support tabs.

~~~
wanderr
I would argue that tabbed or multi-windowed browsing is most important on
limited resource and low bandwidth devices. The main advantage of opening a
tab/window in the background is not having to wait for it to load; the longer
the wait, the more that functionality matters. I used the ability to open
links in a new window extensively as soon as browsers offere that
functionality, which was probably on a 133MHz machine with less than 256MB of
RAM on a 14.4kbps (or 9600 baud...not sure) connection if I remember my
computing timelines correctly.

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mikeyur
I'm really hoping there is a fix for this in 4.0. After all, 4.0 does allow
apps to 'state save' - I can't imagine a cached webpage would use much more
ram than a cached app.

The Safari refresh thing has always bugged me on my iPhone, but I think it's
slightly more acceptable since I have an always-on connection and just have to
wait 10 seconds for a page to reload.

Perhaps Apple's way of getting me to cough up the extra $130 for the 3G...

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raimondious
I don't see how this UI decision — a screen of pages vs. a row of tabs – could
be related to a hardware limitation. All other things remaining the same, why
couldn't the switcher look like tabs instead of pages?

Page caching is the real issue, but I think this could also be addressed by
software if Apple decided to.

Of all the things that could be considered deal breakers for the iPad, this is
among the least of them.

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bmalicoat
Rentzsch (developer of Click To Flash) posted his thoughts on this a bit ago.
[http://rentzsch.tumblr.com/post/382362022/persistent-
mobiles...](http://rentzsch.tumblr.com/post/382362022/persistent-mobilesafari-
pages)

I agree it is very frustrating though. Hopefully it will be addressed in the
next update.

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petercooper
FWIW, there is a tabbed browser for the iPad. It's called Atomic. Seems to
have good reviews but not tried it yet.

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frou_dh
That the iPad got the same amount of RAM as the existing iPhone defintely
seems weak.

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davidedicillo
That's exactly why I waited to get the 3G version. A mobile device that rely
exclusively on WIFI doesn't make sense to me.

Also, as somebody else already pointed out, Instapaper solve this problem in a
very elegant way.

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iaskwhy
I don't own an iPad so I can't test but Opera Mini for iPhone does keep the
other tabs as I left them, no need for refreshing or to show some blank pages.
It really improved my browsing experience on the iPhone.

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defenestrator
A lot of things about the iPad could use some tweaking and fixing up. That
said, it's still better than everything else out there for "simple and ease of
use" devices for the technically inept.

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Qz
I disagree on the need for tabs, but that is a nice looking webpage.

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Roydanroy
There's an app for that.

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J3L2404
The worst part is the constant refresh on Back and Forward buttons.

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binspace
Apple should come up with a gesture to switch between tabs.

IMO, one of the big achievements of Fingerworks keyboard was it's vast array
of gestures. Apple drastically watered down the gesture support in it's
various products. Perhaps to make it simple for grandma?

~~~
Herring
the problem here is once you put two fingers on the surface it starts
expanding/contracting the page

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marknutter
This is FUD. The multitasking to be introduced in the next iteration of the
ipad OS will almost certainly allow for the presence of tabs. I agree that
right now it's somewhat annoying to have tabs lose state once and a while when
I'm browsing, but since I only use my ipad at home where I have a persistent
and fast wifi connection it's not an issue to wait a second for the page to
reload.

The author gushes about how awesome it is to browse the web on the ipad and
then pigeonholes it because he couldn't recall a tab while he was away from an
Internet connection, a closet case if there ever was one. It seems self
defeating to focus on such a minor annoyance. This thing is an amazing piece
of hardware, and no it's not perfect.

~~~
antirez
The iPad OS is perfectly capable of multitasking since version 1.0, this is
just not exposed to the user, so there are no current technical limitations
related to multitasking in order to implement tabs in Safari.

