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Comment by spirit557 | Hacker News Reader

Does anyone else have this experience - The "old" pre-mobile phone style sites that were written without any "mobile experience" in mind are actually the most pleasant and easy to use on a phone (with just some extra zoom needed sometimes) while the mobile version of countless sites are actually the worst? Ironic isn't it.

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It's in part because old displays had a screen resolution 640x480 or 800x600 back in the 90's, only a little more than phone displays (375x667 for something like an iphone SE, but at higher pixel densities).

Since the 90's, desktops went to 1024, 1920 / HD is mainstream now, and 3840 / 4K is on the rise for desktop.

I really don’t have this experience. I’d say these old-school sites are _not the worst_, and that _some_ mobile version of some websites manage to do worse. But it’s not a particularly pleasant experience, no

Not really, the constant zooming is pretty awkward. I know this is the wrong opinion to have on HN, but at least having the content scale to the viewport appropriately is a much nicer experience.

Don’t get me wrong either, this is still a much much better mobile experience than popover garbage and JS dynamic wank.

Agree. The website is not usable with one thumb on mobile.

Maybe language models will bring back the concept of a “user agent”. One could imagine feeding a GPT the source for this page and receiving mobile-friendly source as output.

I’m looking forward to the day where the AI screens all markup rendered in my browser. (Let’s not think of how power inefficient this would be…)

That's certainly one way to add <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1" />

I wish I could, on mobile Firefox, force the viewport or at least easily change it.

    <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0">

This site is perfectly usable on mobile, without even trying to be "mobile first"-garbage.

I mean, HTML was originally invented as an interchange format so that the client could adapt it back into whatever form was suitable.

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