> and unfortunately that's often hiding everything until it's ready.
These sites usually aren't successful in that goal. Sure, they may be able to prevent content from showing up until the webfont has been loaded, but in my experience it's still extremely common for content to seriously jump around as the ads continue to load, especially on smaller screens (mobile).
So using "flash of unstyled content" as an excuse just doesn't hold up: users still have to learn to give a site a few extra seconds to settle before it's safe to interact without the content reflowing under your finger to put an ad where you wanted to tap, and breaking accessibility "for the sake of preventing FOUC" is dumb when you still have FOUC.
A similar tactic I've also seen that is even more unjustifiably anti-user is when the <body> element has "overflow: hidden" set until some heinous script that does it's own poor implementation of smooth scrolling can get up and running. These sites are universally improved by blocking such scripts and enabling native scrolling. This is one of the reasons why I believe browsers should be bundling together a large number of permissions that are off by default for every site the user has not flagged as being a web app. Google Maps has a good reason to interfere with scroll behavior; a news article does not.
These sites usually aren't successful in that goal. Sure, they may be able to prevent content from showing up until the webfont has been loaded, but in my experience it's still extremely common for content to seriously jump around as the ads continue to load, especially on smaller screens (mobile).
So using "flash of unstyled content" as an excuse just doesn't hold up: users still have to learn to give a site a few extra seconds to settle before it's safe to interact without the content reflowing under your finger to put an ad where you wanted to tap, and breaking accessibility "for the sake of preventing FOUC" is dumb when you still have FOUC.
A similar tactic I've also seen that is even more unjustifiably anti-user is when the <body> element has "overflow: hidden" set until some heinous script that does it's own poor implementation of smooth scrolling can get up and running. These sites are universally improved by blocking such scripts and enabling native scrolling. This is one of the reasons why I believe browsers should be bundling together a large number of permissions that are off by default for every site the user has not flagged as being a web app. Google Maps has a good reason to interfere with scroll behavior; a news article does not.