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Comment by phreack | Hacker News Reader

Something barely related that drives me nuts, is that if reflow is something so important (it is), then why is Opera the only Android browser which implements text reflow? !

It should be a top concern for browser and page devs IMO.

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Reflow can mean a bunch of different things. Do you mean that Android browser implements text flowing from one div/tablecell to another?

I replied a wall of text in a sibling (cousin?) post, but here's a video of what the feature I meant. I'm not sure what the most accurate name for it would be, I've always seen it called text reflow. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yAWTd9h1lbI

Could you explain what you mean with an example?

Not the OP, but I think I know what they mean. If you zoom in so that you see a div full of text that would get wider than the screen, Opera will reflow the text to fit the width of the screen even if the underlying page layout is wider. This allows you to read pages at high zoom level without having to pan the page side to side for each line of text.

> Opera will reflow the text to fit the width of the screen even if the underlying page layout is wider.

That is not something I would want in many cases where I'm zooming in on mobile, if I understand you. A lot of time I'm doing that so I can accurately click a link that was too small. I want the text to stay positioned so I can zoom to a specific part of it without it changing underneath me. That's what a zoomed in view means, IMO, especially when considering the origin of the meaning.

You'd be surprised how well this feature works. I don't recall ever having had an issue like the one you describe. The browser isn't changing the entire page layout, mind you. It only re-layouts the text when all you're seeing on screen is pretty much a single div. I guess you have to experience it to understand.

Also works good on sites that are not responsive.

When looking at a desktop sized web page such as old Reddit, most likely an entry's title won't fit horizontally on the screen. What some browsers do (and I really dislike) is that they somehow guess what's important on the page, and bump those elements' font size in ridiculous ways, while leaving others as they are. I believe this is called font inflation, or text size adjustment. This makes it so the title of a Reddit post becomes huge, while the 'see comments' button below it stays ridiculously tiny and unclickable.

Other browsers just don't care, leave the text in desktop-like proportions, and when you zoom in you end up needing to scroll sideways back and forth to read a sentence, quite cumbersome.

The most reasonable solution is Opera's where if you're on a desktop like site and you zoom to a block of text, it allows the letters to increase in size naturally according to your pinching, but when you let go it reflows the text block and makes it wrap once a line (at its new zoom level) reaches your phone's screen width. This way if you see a long paragraph (or Reddit title, for example), you can zoom until the text is readable, and then only need to scroll up and down, instead of sideways as well, without compromising the original site's design by wonking up the font sizes at (apparently) random.

I'm not sure I did the best job at explaining it, but basically the goal is to be able to zoom into small text on desktop-like pages until I'm comfortable with the size, and then make it wrap to the screen's width so you don't need to scroll sideways to read the text.

Easiest demo is to download Opera on Android, go to old.reddit.com and zoom around. Once you get used to it, every other browser becomes annoying.

Edit: lol, after typing all that I thought of looking up a video and here it is. Looks like some phone's default browsers already do it well too. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yAWTd9h1lbI

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