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Comment by samstave | Hacker News Reader

Argh! I accidentally downvoted you when I meant to upvote you. Damn tiny arrows on the phone and no ability to reverse votes. My digital apologies.

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Yeah, maybe it should be a circle you hover your mouse over for a second.

How do you hover the mouse pointer on a phone? :)

I have always thought this about the iPhone (and smartphones in general)

When you put your finger to the screen, it should "bubble zoom" clickable links. and you could slide around to get the exact link you intend to.

Viewing pages with tiny clickables meant for the precision of the mouse is infuriating.

Chrome (currently available as a beta on ICS android devices) does this.

Unfortunately, the implementation is, in my experience, not very good, because it's not consistent. Sometimes it shows up, and other times it doesn't, so you can't rely on it, and you have to make sure that you click perfectly every time in case it doesn't pop up. Which effectively negates the usefulness of the feature.

Try Opera’s mobile browsers. I believe they do essentially this (and have been for years). You can even install it to your iPhone. (And PPK of Quirksmode.org fame says you definitely should, because we devs tend to pretend the mobile world is mostly Webkit, but the reality is still a bit more diverse than that.)

(I see Chrome/Android gets a mention for doing this. It’s kind of funny: Chrome seems to get the credit for features Opera invented, over and over; on desktop: Tabs-on-top. Speed dial. Keyword search. Etc. Of course, I still really respect the Chrome team for being really smart about what features to steal to make a great UX, but Opera deserves love for being such a pioneer!)

Haha, no problem at all.

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