Hacker News Reader

Comment by Isamu | Hacker News Reader

What is shocking to me is that they are discussing mobile website UX in landscape orientation.

So many websites are hostile to or broken in landscape orientation I have come to believe that nobody must use it (other than me.)

E.g. the menu bars ("dickbars") that obscure 50% of the screen in landscape (some of them actually grow bigger in landscape.) E.g. any kind of pop-up that can't be dismissed in landscape. The most hostile is probably the full-screen "rotate your phone" pop-ups, for a regular website.

View on HN

I've brought this up on HN before and no one else seemed to use landscape, to me it's much more natural. There are so many sites which are completely broken that I have started taking screenshots of the worst offenders. The single biggest problems are large menu bars taking up >50% of the screen and full screen popups which cannot be closed because the X is never displayed.

I exclusively use landscape mode due to vision problems. In landscape mode, I can zoom the text a little more and still read the text semi-comfortably without having to horizontally scroll as much as I would in vertical mode.

I know exactly what you mean re: the bars and borders which obscure text, etc in landscape mode. If it gets too bad, I just leave the page.

Use this bookmarklet with Chrome to hide obscuring position:fixed bars:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15292039

^ This, the KillSticky bookmarklet which kills those static framing elements.

I use it all the time, even on the desktop, where those elements break PageDown scrolling.

I do this too, but Firefox will ignore a full-width fix bar when doing space bar/page down scrolling, so it's less necessary. I wish Chromium would pick that up.

If you're using Chrome on Android, turn up "Text Scaling" and enable "Force Zoom" in the Accessibility section in Chrome settings. I can zoom to my heart's content now, and everything is readable from a distance.

I think they are discussing landscape because there is a tendency to force tablet layouts onto mobile users. That and advertisers want the most real estate for their videos.

Visibility be damned if you have to type anything on one of those sites. Keyboard covering the rest of the screen real estate not consumed by dickbars (sorry, I never heard that but it's such an apt description).

New really big phones basically are tablets. The site is easier to enjoy in landscape, often.

Area! The word for the amount of 2D space that something takes up is "area"!

I've stopped complaining about this when I realsied the ads from a couple sites I enjoy don't show up in landscape mode. "Rotate your phone please", nice try!

I've had those popups numerous times and it makes me irrationally angry. Why does an ad get to dictate how I hold my device?

Because you're not paying for the content, so the publisher is desperately trying to get you to click on the adverts which are the only way they can make money.

I didn't see any of those pop-ups once, maybe the ad blocker blocks them or sheer luck with the sites I browse to. However, those menu bars are super annoying. I actively block them with the element picker of uBlock origin. I only want to read a post and the menu is almost always useless. I also block the bottom bars, social bars, the open in app button of Medium, etc.

It's worth doing that only for sites I know I return to. I don't follow any of those sites but many of them are linked many times from aggregators like HN.

I feel a little sorry for the designers and I know I could be missing something but the reading area is more important. Dear designers, how about a button to hide everything but the content? There is reading mode in Firefox but it doesn't work all the times I would need it.

The idea that an iPhone in landscape gets the same styling as an iPad in portrait has always kind of bugged me.

Apps too, how many won’t let you use the keyboard in landscape? How about maps when driving east/west and almost completely obscured?

People don't avoid landscape on mobile because most sites are broken but because that orientation doesn't make sense for consuming website content (except video).

Apart from Netflix and video content, phone operating systems are mostly used in portrait too. So if you're checking email, using the phone or another app, etc. and then go to a browser, you'd have to rotate your phone to get into landscape mode. Even if you optimize it for landscape, it's highly unlikely to be a better experience over portrait. So most people don't do it.

Last time I looked at the overall mobile numbers, landscape and portrait were pretty close as far as usage. But that's including Netflix and other streaming video applications.

When they talk about how much usage native mobile apps have over mobile browser apps/sites they also don't exclude Netflix. That use-case skews the data.

My theory - people that use landscape mode on mobile browsers are above-average consumers of porn (or video in general at least). :)

Your eyes are horizontally aligned, so is your monitor (most likely).

Books and magazines are portrait. My phone monitor is portrait in the OS. If it was a better experience to go landscape on phones, Apple and Google would have made that push.

> People don't avoid landscape on mobile because most sites are broken but because that orientation doesn't make sense for consuming website content (except video).

And images that are wider than they are tall.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com