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Comment by moron4hire | Hacker News Reader

This site works fine on mobile

If by fine you mean I need to zoom and pan to read it then I guess it does, but I doubt anyone would call that "working well on mobile".

I would take

>need to zoom and pan to read

over every time I forbidden to pan and zoom by the site author.

Especially when I'm behind 43" 4k monitor and the site decide

WHAT TEN LINES

PER SCREEN

IS EVERYTHING

I WISHED FOR

It works way better for me on mobile than most new sites do.

Developers assume everyone has the latest iPhone or Pixel. So they take like a minute to load, heat my phone up, drop the battery by 10%, and have a 20% chance of OOM-ing my browser.

The Guardian is the absolute worst at this. I don't know why, it brings mobile Firefox to its knees.

Basically, fancy "mobile friendly" JS is no good if it makes my phone stutter and go catatonic.

Whereas if people just wrote old school "CSS Zen Garden" sites, or even this old table stuff, any ancient phone could handle them easily.

But no, I need to go pay a kid to dig up more coltan.

I can scroll. It's ok. What I can't do is will my phone faster, without shelling out more stupid cash.

Mobile design was something created for old phones that didn't have quite the resolution of computer monitors. Modern phones don't really need mobile designed sites.

You need text to scale and reflow to device width if you want text to be readable. This is one of the main reasons for mobile web design. Else you're stuck panning around the screen to read the text zoomed in.

Once you decide to scale text to device size so that it's readable, you are stuck doing the rest of mobile web design (fluid layout).

You need to allow users to scale text as desired, as the original web intended. You shouldn't make a site targeted to mobile; you should make a site that allows the user to display in their client as they wish.

The problem will fix itself.

To solve that, you have to move from the easier static made-for-one-width design (what we think of as desktop-first design) and move to fluid, reflowable design which we tend to call mobile-friendly design.

Unfortunately, it tends to take more thought because we usually want widescreen components, like sidebars, that are easier to build when you can hard-code a device width, and hard-coding width is what breaks zooming and text size changes.

Kinda doesn't though. Mobile most of all needs concessions for the much more limited input precision.

Personally I prefer pinch zoom for input precision instead of overly mobile design.

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