Ask HN: Mobile site | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Mobile site

97 pointsrangibaby75 comments

HN looks a bit fuarked on my iPhone now. Could you please change it back to serving the desktop version?

I posted about this three times last night before going to sleep, feeling sure that the info would get into circulation. Apparently not! Will explain shortly.

Edit: Here's the story. We occasionally hear from users who say that all of HN's problems on mobile could be fixed by adding one line of markup:

  <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, target-densitydpi=medium-dpi">

We tried it several times and found it didn't work [1]. Last night, we tried again. It looked better than before, so we decided to leave it on for a while and wait to hear from you all [2].

Unfortunately, what happened is what I feared most: total disagreement. Since it was far from a clear win, we've rolled back to the status quo ante. I'm sorry to disappoint those of you who felt it to be an improvement, but you shouldn't have to wait too much longer.

Why not keep it and improve on its problems, or at least do a poll about it? Because it was at best a stopgap until we can release the real solution we're working on, which involves totally different markup. If the stopgap worked well for most people, it would be worth keeping in the interim. But a stopgap that doesn't actually stop the gap will create confusion. I feel like it's our duty to be conservative here until we have something that actually works. It's a high priority, and it's coming.

1 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7985687, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7330107, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6253835, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6253403, and probably others.

2. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9205798, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9205893, and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9205858.

Honest question: don't you have the ability to see what it looks like for yourself or is the only way to test a change like this is to release it to production and measure the numbers of angry comments? Whether a small vocal minority that loves tiny text on small screens agrees or disagrees, the change was a strict improvement over the desktop on mobile version. Is this what YC advises its companies to do? Change nothing as to not piss anyone off, no matter how much damage that causes to the majority of the users? I find that software people are terrified of any change. Move a button and they scream. That does not mean that once something is developed it must stay that way. dang, do you really believe there won't be a public outcry when the new markup is released? Will you roll it back then because someone complained?

Why did you revert the change? Now I can't comfortably browse HN on mobile anymore. It was fine on my Samsung Galaxy S4.

Do you guys need a web developer or something? It's really not that difficult to make a basic site like HN responsive, and test it out on mobile devices (hint: Chrome dev tools let you simulate most mobile devices).

No! Don't, please! It's sooooo much better on my phone now. I used to have to zoom in and put and scroll all over. Text is wrapping now, so maybe some aesthetics are lost, but usability is 100% better.

Also, this thread is going to get voted way up because the title just says HN: Mobile Site. But not necessarily because the op doesn't like it.

The new version looks much better to me on iPhone 6. No longer do I have to zoom in or use landscape mode to read the titles.

I agree. I do wish that comment voting arrows were as large as homepage voting arrows.

Up and down arrows should be more separated. Ideally up-down should be undoable, I know it's harder to do.

The upvote / downvote buttons have been "wontfix" for years now. :-(

I've been using http://hn.premii.com with great success. Super slick UI and runs great as a full screen Chrome app. Missing features are adding comments and upvotes, but it provides direct link to real HN comments page where you can do that instead. Their Android app is good too, but web client feels faster on my phone.

Feels very heavy on Firefox in Android.

Yes. Main problem is scrolling is not smooth. I told Mozilla mobile folks, but they think its smooth.

Author here: You can download iOS/Android app too. It supports upvoting.

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/hacker-news-yc/id713733435

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.premii.hn

I just wanted to extend my appreciation for your work. It's by far the most used app on my iPhone; even occupying a spot on the main navbar.

Occasionally, I've noticed scrolling performance degrades when viewing comments (only for articles with many comments (>100). But force closing seems to resolve the issue. Otherwise, it's rock solid and beautifully functional.

iPhone 4s/5? I have 5s, and didn't notice that, but I also mostly use my Android device.

It actually gets ycombinator page, parses DOM and generates JSON that I can use in my app. I think that might be the reason.

It's an iPhone 5s. It only occurs after I've used the app for a while, then switching to an article with a large number of comments; scrolling can become laggy enough to render the app unusable (i.e. scrolling even a small amount takes over a second; lag seems to scale based on the comment count).

I'm guessing that if the DOM is parsed completely prior to rendering the comments, that shouldn't be a bottleneck--unless the parsing step is re-run as scrolling occurs to render comments dynamically.

Or given that a forced restart resolves the issue, perhaps it's a memory issue; i.e. if the JSON data is held in memory for each article viewed, and it continues to grow. This is certainly not a showstopper, and it's a fantastic app! But figured you'd appreciate the info.

I second the request. Some things that makes it specially hard to read on iPhone:

1) It wastes a lot of horizontal space with white paddings on both sides. It may be a stylistic decision but takes valuable space that could be used to show more words in a line, leading to less lines 2) There is no right padding in the text lines, the text touches the right side of the inner container.

All in all it would be better to simply serve the Desktop version, maybe with an slightly increased font size so it is more readable.

And please don't make the same mistake many sites (Slashdot among them) make: trying to ram an ill thought bad designed new version on their faithful userbase just for the sake of change and novelty.

There are things to improve but the best way to determine it is to actually test it beforehand in the same environment it will be used in production. These changes were definitively not tested on iPhone's Safari and it shows.

> "... just for the sake of change and novelty."

I agree with the earlier comments you make (re spacing) but this change isn't happening purely for the sake of it. Folks have been asking for a mobile-friendly HN for a long time. Even though I'm not overjoyed with the version I saw today, I'm glad it's progressing.

>> All in all it would be better to simply serve the Desktop version, maybe with an slightly increased font size so it is more readable.

It is the desktop version with width adjusted.

>> ... new version on their faithful userbase just for the sake of change and novelty. A mobile version of the site has been requested over and over again. So, it is definitely not for the sake of change and novelty.

While it may not be perfect, it is still a better read on my OPO than the earlier desktop version.

I use http://cheeaun.github.io/hackerweb/, except it doesn’t support writing comments directly (you have to click the link go to the original page).

Could still be much better, but looking forward to not accidentally fat fingering the comments link all the time.

I'd be happy to help improve, even working within the constraints of not changing any of the underlying markup. Feel free to message me.

Also what's with the '.rotate180' CSS class in the stylesheet, as much as I love reading upside down, I can't see why thats needed?

Perhaps when the orientation of the phone is upside down it can automatically rotate it for you.

Yes, it's terrible on the 4s.

The menu doesn't fit the viewport and gets jammed if your username is more than a few characters long (or you have many karma points)

You still need to zoom to hit the up/down arrows, so not much is gained.

Same exact thing on an iPhone 6.

Looks ++ungood on the 5s too: https://twitter.com/jackgavigan/status/577121192664006657

The menu even wraps on the iPad in landscape orientation: http://i.imgur.com/4ghJIufh.jpg

Are you here to read the menu? I spent a huge amount of hours reading comments on HN on mobile. In fact it is the only site that does not work on mobile that I don't refuse to visit. So while I don't understand why it took HN nearly 7 years to become slightly more mobile friendly, I will take any improvement to its readability.

No, I vastly prefer the mobile site on my phone.

+1, zooming all the time was getting tiresome. It could use a few small tweaks in font sizing and margins, but its vastly improved.

I agree it's moving in the right direction. Zooming out and using landscape gets annoying.

Please, on #hnmain:

  width: 100%; // Fixes white borders (browser default table width is normally something like 85%) 
  max-width: 750px; // Keeps columns from getting overly wide on desktop

I usually specify my max-widths in em (empirically found the sweet spot at about 40-60em).

I do it because I think it maps better to text widths, which is what you ultimately want to prevent getting overly wide. It also handles different font sizes fine, making the site still accessible for people with big system-wide fonts.

I'd like to know, is there a downside to em or a reason to use px instead?

Hrm, that's an interesting concept I hadn't heard of before. I use px because that's what Chrome's responsive view uses, and because that's what viewport uses. I think 'big text' is generally going out of fashion in favour of proper zoom (though we should really get some numbers on that).

IMO the idea of a mobile site is a good one but right now the font sizes are definitely too large for comfortable reading (esp in landscape orientation) where before they were way too small.

FWIW font size is ideal for me.

Font size seem ideal on homepage. But, font-size for comments is smaller.

It seems to differ per page. Font size on the homepage and threads page are ridiculously large for me in landscape and ok in portrait. Font size on article comments is ok now - think they may have just tweaked it.

Edit: I take that back. Still unreadably large in portrait.

Where is this mobile site? I'm seeing the same old desktop version on my mobile and no new "Mobile version" link.

I don't see any changes to this one to make it responsive either.

OP means responsive design, not 2010-era separate mobile site. Front page is responsive (but still needs some fixes), comments pages are still super wide and need scrolling on each line.

I use HackerWeb (http://hackerwebapp.com) on both my iPhone, iPad and Fire Phone (Firefox OS). It is a superbly executed HTML5 application.

I also use this one, it's really well done and works very well.

+1 for a great app! It's a pity that it's a read-only view on Hacker News; you can't upvote stories, comment or submit anything. It puts you in lurking mode, alas.

And for the people thinking "How does that HackerWeb compare to the web app of Lim Chee Aun?": it's the same as http://cheeaun.github.io/hackerweb/.

http://i.imgur.com/qr6MAwK.jpg

This is absolutely awful, how do I fix this?

Edit: I guess that isn't so awful, but before you could see maybe 20% of the links and zoom in as needed. Now it's forcibly zoomed in so much you can only see one link and everything is squashed together.

The menu looks a little goofy, but overall the experience of reading the links is now far better on my iPhone 6.

The new frontpage disables Android's double-tap-and-drag-down zoom function, which is a gigantic regression for a site with tiny arrows and tiny links.

It's like they added a percentage width to some tables and now it's "mobile." (Edit: spelling)

Amazing the (IMO) improvements a few percentages adds to the readability on mobile.

It’s not a separate mobile site. It appears they’re adding a little responsiveness to the current design. And that’s a great idea for this kind of content.

I use this app on android,not sure about iphone app,its a decent one anomg the lot.pretty much satisfied with it. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.premii.hn

iOS: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/hacker-news-yc/id713733435

Or Just web: http://hn.premii.com/

I made this site for myself: http://www.serializer.io it's linear and takes content from r/programming and product hunt too but it's what I use for reading HN on my phone.

Better! Just less left/right margins.

Perhaps HN mods could have a poll on the different changes? I like big fonts; I like the bigger buttons; I'm less keen on the big margins but I don't particularly care about them.

Lumia 930 here and I'd vote for reverting to the desktop site.

The new front-page zoom is so pronounced that only seven items are displayed simultaneously (previously around 20 to 25). It is obviously easier to click on article links, but not notably easier to click on comment links or the voting arrows.

The comments page is the real problem. Where I used to see the whole width of the comments page and was able to read without adjustment, the page shows the left half of comments initially and I must zoom out every time.

Screw all the iphone users. HN is now usable on firefox/Android. Don't change it back because Safari has rendering bugs.

Yesterday version was better on my Galaxy S2 with Opera (blink engine). The new one has left and right margins that reduce the area available for text. That's much visible on the home page. The comments pages are maybe the same but I've got the feeling that text is smaller because I don't remember having to tap so often to read.

Were there any recent changes? Site looks a bit big on the iPad now. :-(

I don't really want to see any mobile version on my iPad.

Agreed - was just about to post this. The whole point of the iPad, IMHO, is to give a "portable desktop" browser experience. I can't stand when sites do the awkward in-between tablet version. Looks worse and less usable. I'm ok with the idea of responsive design, but let's stick with desktop and phone as the two versions.

cautiously optimistic. keep iterating..

Are the comments rendered differently on the mobile site, or simply the homepage? For what it's worth, I'm still getting the desktop version of the comments on Firefox for Android[0].

[0] User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Android; Mobile; rv36.0) Gecko/36.0 Firefox/36.0)

Looks fine on Opera on Samsung. At least that's what I would call fine. http://milankragujevic.com/uploads/Screenshot_2015-03-15-16-...

For this reasons I have made pinch.js (https://github.com/fugyk/pinchjs). It enables desktop like zooming in mobile.

Home page is ok but comments page is wide and I can't read them

The padding around the content on the page is a bit excessive.

Please get rid of the white padding on the sides. Takes up valuable area and squeezes the center content too much. Particularly bad in landscape.

Mh, on my phone it is as it has always been (which is not good on small screen operated with fingers). How do I see the mobile version?

The header bar is pretty bad on iPhone5; needs to be totally reworked if you are going to roll your own mobile like this.

Why not just use Bootstrap?

Looks like only the home page is responsive now. Viewing this thread right now on a Samsung Galaxy S4 and the font is too small.

The header looks a bit odd to me, but otherwise I find it a massive improvement; no need to zoom any longer.

At least we can still zoom. +1

I kinda like the mobile version, it seems to have a bit to go, but not bad.

I read it using flipboard on my iphone. Works like a charm.

On Chrome, you can do Menu -> Request Desktop Version

Use the HN Cards app on iPhone, much better..

Looks fabulous.

Have I stumbled into some parallel universe? Let me get this straight: HN, a haven for hackers, developers, entrepreneurs, and the big wigs of the valley cannot get a webmaster to spend a day on making some really basic changes to the CSS and HTML to make the site responsive on mobile, which is probably the way lots of people read it. When a half hearted attempt is finally made, people complain and demand it be returned to the abominable state it previously was because the experience is somehow worse on mobile? What the hell is going on?! How is the experience worse? How is it that HN cannot get help with this? There have been so many volunteers saying "just let me fix it", yet it is a resource problem? Or is this some type of natural selection for hackers who do not own mobile devices or have strong eye? This is so backwards I feel like a teenage girl in that I cannot even.

Well, we did ask for a mobile version, but not like this!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com