From the Post’s ombudsman, Patrick Pexton:
Porn sites download faster than The Post’s Web site. Really.
I could say that I know that firsthand, but that would be embarrassing. And besides, I don’t have to.
I’ll let Jack, a longtime reader of The Post online, speak to this via his recent e-mail to me:
“Perhaps it will impress on you how sluggishly your pages load to learn that pornography sites download much faster than washingtonpost.com does! Trust me on this. And those sites’ pages are much more ‘content dense’ and have significantly more ‘dynamic’ content and ads than washingtonpost.com, with very little simple text (obviously!). . . .
“By contrast, your site subjects me to a tedious, lumbering stream of browser ‘Waiting for [various] plug-in’ messages and download-progress bars. Meanwhile, my screen remains frozen, so I can’t even scroll through the content that has already downloaded. This seldom happens on the porn sites I frequent.”
Jack isn’t alone in his frustration with the loading times of pages from washingtonpost.com. In the past couple of months these kinds of letters have increased and now are the most numerous topic in my folder of complaints about the Web site.
So, has anyone tried this test for NRO?