03 Jun 2026

In March, John Gruber wrote:

The print edition of The New Yorker could not possibly be more respectful of both the reader’s attention and the sanctity of the prose they publish. But read an article on their website and you get autoplaying videos interspersed between random paragraphs. And the videos have nothing to do with the article you’re reading. I mean, we should be so lucky if every website were as respectfully designed as The New Yorker’s, but even their website — comparatively speaking, one of the “good ones” — shows only a fraction of the respect for the reader that their print edition does.

Autoplay is egregious, but they do stick their cartoons and poems inside their print articles. They also put a card to subscribe inside of every magazine, even if you’re already subscribed, in case you know someone who wants to send them a check. The cards tend to fall out awkwardly and are pretty similar to a “dickover.”

Article pages are also three columns of text (not exactly conducive to reading) on somewhat shiny paper (can attract glare).

New Yorker articles work okay with Instapaper (even without a subscription), and that’s probably the best way to read them for now. (Gruber appears to like scrolling articles with his Space bar, but I don’t think that’s a good subsitute for real pages.)

But in his complaints about ads and popovers what I think’s glaring is Chrome, Safari, and Firefox lacking default and/or native content blocking since adblockers are the most popular extensions and extensions are security vulnerbilities. (Chrome for Android doesn’t have extensions.)

Blocking all ads is extreme, though. Before uBlock Origin was the internet’s favorite adblocker, it was AdBlock Plus. But AdBlock Plus had “Acceptable Ads,” even though they could easily be turned off.