Hacker News Reader

Comment by dingo_bat | Hacker News Reader

I think Apple deliberately cripples the browser on ipad. It really has the worst browsing experience. My android phone displays pages better. I think they want to drive people towards making an app for every website.

For eg, how many of you use an app to browse hn? Even though the website is so lean and fast, it is horrible to use on an ipad.

View on HN

Oh, I do it all the time. It seems fine...

I use hn.premii.com, as well as hckrnews.com with a bookmarklet that turns all the links into hn.premii.com links.

I generally prefer the reading experience on my iPad because of this, actually. The only reason I go back to the normal site on my mac is if I want to comment, or if I want to make use of the 'new comments since last visit' feature (via a chrome plugin).

If the hn.premii.com developer is reading this: any chance you could add a visual indicator for new comments? would make my experience perfect.

Can you give us any details of what you mean by 'horrible' or 'worst'?

Scrolling has a lot of issues. The behavior seen in the video is common on many websites. And then there are some pages which simply won't load. I do not have examples offhand, though. Facebook is a really laggy and glitchy affair, even though the screen size is enough to display the full website.

That doesn’t happen to me on my iPad Air running iOS 7. A big part of that might be because I have the iPad connect to a proxy server which blocks a huge swath of ad servers though.

HN is horroble on Android too, because the HN powers refuse to create a mobile layout.

HN is actually pretty great on the Android default browser on an older Samsung phone. My only complaint is the vote button placement and size.

Other browsers like Firefox and Chrome completely fail at reflowing HN.

Not true, there was one briefly but it was so hated that it was scuttled. People who use sites like this one tend to dislike change, in my experience.

Yes a responsive version seems too much to ask in 2015 :) I use hn.premii.com to read the news on HN, it's using the API and it's... responsive.

That's not why. HN's design is very old and table based so it's not easy to make it responsive / mobile friendly. It's also not easy to change the design because the HTML is integrated into the code rather than being separate templates.

They're working on improving it but it's an ongoing process.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com