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Comment by monster_group | Hacker News Reader

Pardon my UI / CSS ignorance but these days I find that I have to zoom in every single article on the web to read it comfortably. I had to zoom this article at 200%. The default text is just too small and I am just using a standard HD display. It would be even smaller on higher resolutions. Do people not view their own website? Does everybody else also find themselves zooming in most of the web pages. What am I missing?

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I zoom in pretty much everything too.

The vast majority of web designers are clueless or just don't care about font size recommendations. Most studies recommend at least 18 px for body text, but almost every website goes smaller. Medium is a notable exception, they have sane defaults.

I have the opposite problem. I tend to zoom out since huge font sizes became a trend a few years ago. They're so humongous that it's very tiring to read at the default size. This is especially pronounced on websites like Medium, where I have the zoom set to 80 % permanently.

It might be related to you having a 4K/Retina monitor and the website's author having an older (i.e. regular) display.

The author might never have tested their website on a large display like ours and thus it'll look a bit odd and we have to zoom in.

No it's tiny on a regular display

Try the reader view available on Mozilla Firefox (but perhaps also on other browsers)

Gets me from https://screenshots.firefox.com/2Gu0kninnhAnZKVw/www.smashco... to https://i.imgur.com/tld6Kl6.png

Yes, it's great for focusing on content. I wish I could enable the reader view by default for a list of sites. Or even better, the browser does so automatically when a page has lots of text and is not responsive/is too small.

There are extensions that do some of those things.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/automatic-rea...

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/auto-reader-v...

Don't hi-res monitors have UI scaling built in to the OS? so sizes should be roughly comparable

Sometimes it feels like everything is still done by pixel counting on bitmaps.

Scaling never worked properly on any OS.

It's an impossible problem to solve because sizes are given in pixel or percentage. Whatever you try to adjust, it will be utterly wrong on some combination of content and display.

Funny you say that because i find the font size used by that site to be the most comfortable for me (and i have far from a good sight...) and i really dislike sites that use huge letters (like f.e. Medium). Then again, i prefer small font sizes in general and i dislike the tendency to waste space in modern UIs - both web-based and desktop (and mobile, but i don't use that much and in mobile it is kinda of acceptable because fingers - although i'd really like it if mobiles came with a stylus instead and adjusted their UIs accordingly).

What irritates me more about Medium and like than the font size is the use of persistent banners both at the top and bottom of the screen.

Maybe fine when reading in portrait on a tablet or like, but not at all fine on a desktop.

I often use something like https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/easyreader/boamfhe... to give a nice reading experience for lengthy articles. Works fairly well.

I'd been doing this a lot lately and thought it might be time for a new prescription on my lenses. Maybe it's just poor UX after all. I've never been a "content should be completely separate from presentation" guy, but recent design choice by websites have pushed me further in that direction.

The sites are not "responsive".

This particular site starts with a relatively small font and not responsive which I'm sure makes it a pain to use on small displays.

What am I missing?

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