Hacker News Reader

Comment by leorocky | Hacker News Reader

This website is even difficult to read on a regular desktop browser (too wide, downvoted comments increasingly impossible to read causing eye strain). I recommend using your own content script with Chrome. This may not help on your iPad but on Android you can use Firefox with your own userscript. It's the only way I can tolerate it.

It would probably take a competent someone a few hours to fix the readability issues of this site but they just never get around to it.

Edit:

Here's a link to what all comments look like for me, even if they're downvoted:

http://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/s/v5zcn9n4vg4m3cn/2014-06-1...

I also disabled scores and voting because I dislike that stuff.

This is the home page:

http://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/s/sicqor50smsl4hx/2014-06-1...

View on HN

joblessjunkie means the original article's site.

Pinch-to-zoom works fine on HackerNews on an iPad, and the HackerNews font is nothing unusual.

Regarding HN being too wide, why don't you narrow your browser window?

Personally, I like the fact the traditional web design in which HN adjusts the line to screen width rather than imposing a width.

Hm, I’d be happy with some max-width:50em or so on the actual text. Now if only Firefox had a built-in way to apply custom user stylesheets to websites…

It's not built-in but the Stylish extension does that.

greasemonkey can too, with the added benefit of being able to script the page as well.

Claudius is being sarcastic. http://kb.mozillazine.org/index.php?title=UserContent.css

Chrome however is deprecating this feature. Stylish will be required.

Sarcastic, yes, but mostly relating to Opera 12.x’s UserCSS features; I didn’t actually know about userContent.css. Thanks for the pointer, although it seems to be impossible to only apply it to certain sites?

@-moz-document url-prefix() or @-moz-document domain() ? https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/@document http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?t=286866

Yay, thank you for the handholding, it actually seems to work quite nicely :-)

> Regarding HN being too wide, why don't you narrow your browser window?

Narrow my browser window because this one site makes it difficult to read? I could do that, or I could just use a content script and leave my browser at the width I prefer. I maximize my browser for distraction free reading.

Can you explain to me the issue with it being too wide?

I may not be understanding it, because I just maximized the window and I don't see any issue, really.

Oftentimes, narrowing HN below 1280px is still not enough as the content then scrolls sideways, so there is a very good argument for putting a width on content that doesn't adjust to the window size properly.

The Original article seems to mis-quote browser marketshare. They have IE10 listed as 3% of the market and "Other" as 36%? And all the IE's combined for 19% market share? Everything I've seen (except the original article) list the IE's at a combined market share somewhere in the neighborhood of 50-70%., with IE8 still having a dominant 15-20%.

I'm not sure what the global numbers are at right now, but Microsoft and Google have roughly 30% each in America.

See my other comment for the reason for discrepancy.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7883973

HN doesn't reflow/wrap text to window size on Android Chrome or Firefox. Only the pre-KitKat "Browser" works on HN.

Opera kept that feature, it works.

I just downloaded Opera for Android because of this, but no, it does not work as the old android browser did. Or do I need to adjust a setting for this somewhere?

Personally, I like the fact the traditional web design in which HN adjusts the line to screen width rather than imposing a width.

Its just that it ruins the experience on mobile devices because you can't resize the window and zooming doesn't reflow the text.

for what it's worth, I don't really have a problem with it. They provide an API and there are like 90 billion ycombinator mobile apps to choose from which do a better job.

ah, it's a mobile issue. I strictly use a desktop for HN and was confused about why people were complaining.

Eight,I'm sure I'm going to resize my browser just to read HN and then maximize it again when I navigate away to a site which uses a sane content width. No need to be an apologist. I like the content here,but the design in many respects,is awful (expired links anyone?).

I have no issues whatsoever with the width/layout issues, but the expires links... yes.

I don't think joblessjunkie was talking about HN.

On my desktop browser, I can only browse Hacker News with zoom at 150%.

Just select the text of a downvoted comment to have readable colors

HN is tiny and unreadable in default Android chrome.

Hard to read downvoted comments is a feature not a usability bug.

Down voted comments are supposed to be hard for everyone to read.

I don't think a screen reader would pick up the down-voted comments as different from other comments. So, it's still broken from an accessibility standpoint.

Aural style sheets? Do they work?

I think Emacspeak was the only screen reader that supported even just a limited subset of aural styles.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emacspeak

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