Websites Prep for Google’s ‘Mobilegeddon’ | Hacker News Reader

Websites Prep for Google’s ‘Mobilegeddon’

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186 pointssssaylin180 comments

This is somewhat to my annoyance, because I frequently find mobile-friendly pages less friendly on mobile than desktop pages.

Specifically, mobile-friendly typically disables zoom, so that zooming can't be used to choose text size or to scroll through the page at a higher rate. Instead, everything is reduced to a kind of very long ticker-tape, where if you're deep into the page, you need to scroll many, many times to get anywhere.

Alternatively, you get a page broken up into expandable sections, like mobile wikipedia, where it's very tedious to visually scan the page. Wikipedia is one of the best examples of a site where I prefer the desktop page on mobile.

Another issue is limited functionality. Sites with complex forms typically present a hobbled or otherwise limited, basic mobile experience.

I agree with you.

I think it has to do with a kind of counter-purpose development where the people who create the devices are trying to create a good experience on websites and the designers of websites keep moving the goalposts.

Perhaps it's time that web designers are subject (or subject themselves) to a similar set of human interface guidelines that app developers are subject to, for instance.

It's a shame the semantic web hasn't taken off. Yeah, it's neat what you can do with a webpage these days, but 99% of the time, "web design" today sucks to the point where I'm relieved when I end up on an old "black text, white background, underlined blue links" site.

I would love to replace web pages with an RSS reader type program that just displays content and navigation in a legible format.

But with all the fancy stuff that's being added on and on, it seems like the best we're going to get is browsers with a reading "try to unfuck the formatting" button once you've gotten to the content you want.

You should try a text-based browser like Lynx (http://lynx.isc.org/). All CSS and JavaScript is stripped away, leaving the user with unaltered HTML.

In my opinion, all sites should be usable like this. Styles and scripts should merely be enhancements, not requirements.

>In my opinion, all sites should be usable like this. Styles and scripts should merely be enhancements, not requirements.

As much as I agree, many sites are not usable like this :(

And there are aspects of CSS that I do want to keep, like making the navigation lists properly horizontal (and in some cases, nested with hovers). Without CSS, you sometimes have to scroll through several pages of expanded out header/navigation before you find the content.

The problem is that we use the internet for more than just sites, we use it for web applications now too. Making sure the site works without javascript is usually possible, but often much more work. For sites that are presenting information to me, or where I'm interacting in a minimal way, a well defined static interface is preferable. For complex applications, I would definitely prefer a more rich experience than is provided by HTML+CSS and HTTP (although with HTML5 it's not as bad as it used to be).

Definitely true. But I've noticed that web applications are usually not awful design offenders.

An unusable webapp frustrates users and drives them off, but an informational page trying to be some kind of 1920's prediction of a futuristic interactive magazine is annoying at most. I can always figure out how to read the text, so I just put up with the stupid design.

I recently realized how often web developers defending the status quo have internalized a circular reasoning regarding "what the Internet is for". So the Internet is for web applications now, so we need to have all that stupid crap in CSS and dump metric tons of JavaScript on everyone. But if you suggest that maybe we should then drop the content/layout "separation" and make CSS actually nice to work with, the same people will tell you that "web is for documents", so what we have now is good.

I'm beginning to wonder if we shouldn't split the Internet into two - one for cloud apps and another for content - and design the tech stacks accordingly.

I'm fairly sure you're just conflating two separate opinions from many, many different people, and using your personal biases to crap on that conflation, so that you can bolster a fairly weak point.

It's so odd that gopher sounds like a fresh solution to this over-proliferation of design. I wonder if there's potential for a modern version.

I guess the problem is our attention economy. As a designer your job is to hold attention, and this drives design trends so far from competitors that usability suffers.

Although we do see that people love the uniformity of the big social networks. I find Twitter's clean timeline much more helpful than visiting individual websites.

I wonder if we'll continue to see a trend of the web separated into app-level experiences & information silos. I'm thinking there's a big void in the market for something like squarespace meets tumblr.

The uniformity is definitely a big plus on sites like Facebook and Twitter. The rest of the internet feels like Myspace by comparison.

And don't forget about being unable to zoom into an image when it's been made too small to be able to actually see the details.

Thankfully in andorid's chrome you can actually turn off the zoom lock for all websites in the accessibility settings.

This. I can't believe Twitter actually does that; it's uber painful to browse photos in tweets, which unfortunately I needed to do quite often recently.

> Wikipedia is one of the best examples of a site where I prefer the desktop page on mobile.

I actually have the opposite opinion, that the mobile wikipedia version is much better-designed and intuitive. I prefer the mobile version on desktop.

I absolutely despise the fact that all sections are collapsed on load on mobile. That means "search in page" is broken and Wikipedia without search in page isn't Wikipedia at all.

That only needs an "expand all" button; apparently that's been denied, though: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T21924

That is an ancient bug report not related to the current mobile interface ("MobileFrontend"). I think it predates that by a year or two.

You have "search in page" on your mobile browser? (My iPhone doesn't have that!)

Chrome on iOS has in the burger menu "Find in Page". That burger menu scrolls.

It's iPhone's number 1 unknown feature. I've been using computers since I was two and it took me more than a year to find this: just type in the search term in the safari search bar, then scroll down in the autocomplete results (without hitting go or enter). It'll come up after autocomplete and history/bookmark matches - and it's been there since at least iOS 6.

Worst. UX. Ever.

Well I'll be damned.

The other one in a similar vein is pulling the search results down (before typing anything) to get 'Request Desktop Site'. It took a while before I stopped having to pause to remember where that was each time I wanted it.

Before this, when iOS had separate search and URL boxes, typing in the Google search box would offer a prompt to search in the page since ... maybe v3 was it? Hence why that moved to the URL box when the boxes merged. Yes, it sucks.

It does if you use the Chrome browser.

Also you can't view the article's categories. You need desktop view for that.

I'd wager most people agree with you, despite the majority opinion you see on HN. User engagement levels have been higher on every mobile-optimised site I've worked on, when compared to mobile users looking at a desktop version.

This might be because any mobile-optimized site that tracks user engagement levels is more likely to be a good mobile site. People on HN don't say that all mobile sites are bad, just that a lot of bad ones are worse than desktop sites.

What mobile device is wikipedia designed for exactly? Its such a small and spartan design that it seems like the kind of thing you'd see on an early 2000's site when stuff like Palm and Windows Mobile came out.

Why aren't the sections already opened by default? Why aren't there any images? My phone out-performs desktops from just a few years back. I don't need this super-minimalist wikipedia. I just need something that's slightly more responsive because I don't have the horizontal space to handle all of its columns properly.

> Why aren't the sections already opened by default?

If sections are all expanded, one has to scroll an unknown distance to get to the section one is interested in. If sections were to expanded by default, it would probably be better to not make them collapsable at all and instead include in the mobile layout the table of contents found in the desktop layout. However the table of contents uses anchor links which may be less usable in a mobile context (easier to lose your sense of place, a user's desire to not click links that may load a new page for performance and/or bandwidth reasons).

I agree that an "expand all" option would be a useful addition, I didn't follow the link in another post that presumably explains why one isn't being added.

That's what anchor tags with an id tag are for, so it scrolls to the section you want. Which they use on the desktop but, wait for it, you can guess what's coming here, not on the mobile site...

I feel like I've had so many conversations of this form:

User: This doesn't work on your mobile site, why don't you just give me your desktop site because it works better?

Mobile web site dev: We can't do that on mobile because X.

User: But X is already a solved problem on the existing site.

Mobile web site dev: Sorry, but we need to do a mobile site.

How often have you been able to browse the content you want just by the section heading? They are somewhat informative, but I find it much much faster and easier to scroll through the sections skimming the text and images.

Collapsibility means requiring high-precision clicking, instead of low-precision sweeping of the finger.

I don't spend a lot of time looking at Wikipedia on my phone but I'd have to say I do like the collapsed section design. I rarely want to read an article top to bottom and having the collapsed sections makes it very quick to view just the section(s) with the most promising heading.

> a user's desire to not click links that may load a new page for performance and/or bandwidth reasons

I see your point in general, but even the average user browses Wikipedia often enough to realize they're always in-page links. If only by accident, I hit the wrong link often enough :)

Imo the Wikipedia app is much better, and addresses all those points. I think it's been getting the main development time lately, because the previous app was ancient/broken and so they tasked a team with redoing it. But now it's ahead of the mobile site, which was previously ahead. I'm not 100% sure why they actually need the app vs. just a good mobile site though.

Wikipedia mobile is probably ultimately slightly better but uncollapsing through all the sections is dreadful.

I'd really like to be able to collapse sections from the bottom of a section, rather than scrolling upwards frantically trying to find the header so I can re-collapse it.

I really hate how the mobile version removes the ability to view article categories and talk pages.

Sometimes I use the mobile version of Wikipedia just so I can read text that's pleasantly formatted with limited line widths like almost every printed or post-1990's digital text. The wide-as-possible lines, which sometimes make me resort to putting my finger on the screen to keep track of what line I'm on, are a ridiculous legacy.

" mobile-friendly typically disables zoom"

That's just a stupid choice made by (so many) web developers. I checked a sampling of my own sites with Google's tool and they all passed as mobile friendly, but none of them disable zooming. (HN fails, of course.)

I made a bookmarklet for that reason:

    javascript:m=document.querySelector('meta%5Bname=viewport%5D');m.content=m.content.replace(/.*(width=%5B%5E,%5D+).*/,%22$1,maximum-scale=10,minimum-scale=0.1,user-scalable=1%22);

And a second one to disable CSS-based responsiveness:

    javascript:m=document.querySelector('meta%5Bname=viewport%5D');m.content=%22width=1024,maximum-scale=10,minimum-scale=0.1,user-scalable=1%22;

What's a good way to easily call up bookmarklets on mobile? I use short, unique bookmark names. If you know of any better method, I'd love to hear it :)

I really want a "disable zoom disable" button.

HM doesn't disable zoom, it just displays in a teeny tiny font.

This is a well known and hard to fix bug that I've been following. It affects other websites too, typically forums and other pages with large tables and short paragraphs of text.

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=707195

Firefox for Android has the Always Zoom extension, https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/android/addon/always-zoom/?....

> That's just a stupid choice made by (so many) web developers.

Sometimes it's stupid, sometimes not. Disabling zoom removes the 300ms delay added to most interactions on mobile devices [1]. You can alternatively use fastclick.js [2] or swiftclick.js [3], but that's an extra lib/http request to load.

[1] http://updates.html5rocks.com/2013/12/300ms-tap-delay-gone-a...

[2] https://github.com/ftlabs/fastclick

[3] https://github.com/tmwagency/swiftclick

According to your first link, there is no reason to disable zoom. This gives you the best of both worlds:

    <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width">

It retains zoom and gets rid of the 300ms delay. At least in chrome, so the site says.

FF says this issue is "RESOLVED FIXED", so maybe they implemented it too:

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=941995

I have that meta tag on all my sites and I just tested on Android and iOS: Clicking on links and other controls seem instant. And zoom works. Hurray!

    "<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width">"

Which is just what I do. Disabling zoom is one of those nonsensical practices that spreads as web "developers" copy code from each other. I suppose there's a use case for it somewhere, but its main purpose is to remove choice and make sites harder to use.

EDIT: Actually I also include the initial-scale as in the comment below.

I have

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

Huh. I only have the initial-scale entry, and I think that my sites always show up with page width matching device width as a result. Is there something important that the extra width specification does that I'm missing?

ah excellent, went ahead and updated my properties :)

Disabling zoom prevents people with visual acuity issues from browsing your site.

I know only lip-service is paid towards accessibility but zoom shouldn't be able to be disabled except by the user.

I disable zoom to prevent IOS and Android from zooming in when a textbox is focused. How else can I prevent this?

Why do you feel you need to prevent it? As a user I'm pretty sure I'd rather just zoom back out if I want to, or use a browser that didn't do this if it really bothered me. But not having the option to zoom is annoying.

As a user I find having to do this incredibly annoying.

Maybe my phone is just a little zealous with the zooming, but it loves to zoom into the top-left corner of the textarea. The first thing I do uses three pinches' worth to zoom back out, and if I ever have to move the cursor and thus touch into the textarea again, it zooms in again.

As a front-end dev, I'm really curious about this. If you're using a native mobile app, do you expect the UI to zoom in on text inputs as well? Is that a common UI behavior?

I've always been a fan of moving mobile web towards the standards and behaviors of native apps which generally did not require zooming to get tasks done.

Yes, it does happen on some text inputs, it tends to depend on relative size (for example, I recall zoom in landscape but not necessarily in portrait, etc.).

Generally I welcome it, because I can click on the teeeny input field and have it come "closer" to me for editing then get out of the way.

It used to be the case and I think still is for a large case of mobile/tablet devices to just set font size on inputs to 16px.

I think with ios 8 this has changed.

There's a magic font-size that prevents this... I think it was around 19px, but I'm not sure...

FYI, it seems to be 16 http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2989263/disable-auto-zoom...

Make the font of your input larger: http://stackoverflow.com/a/6394497/93995.

For someone who just heard about this change, what Google tool are you referring to?

Presumably https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/mobile-friendly/

Awesome, thank you!

I disabled zoom on a web property i own because it played havoc with a `position:fixed` top header. When you zoom in, the top header scales up as well and covers the entire content.

This may not be within your power, but you should consider removing the fixed header instead. They take up precious screen real space on already small devices, usually in the name of branding.

I disagree. People needs to have fixed headers that auto hides on scroll down and auto shows when you start scrolling up.

Due to that low screen real estate there is an extreme amount of scrolling down, whenever you need that header to navigate you end up needing to scroll a long way to the top.

Links from the bottom are easily forgotten about when you're half or 80% of the way through an article. Likewise follow you around widgets are a painful annoyance 100% of the time.

> I disagree. People needs to have fixed headers that auto hides on scroll down and auto shows when you start scrolling up.

I still find that very annoying. Sometimes I have to scroll up and find that damn thing covering part of my screen again.

Fortunately I have a bookmarklet that zaps all the position:fixed elements to static :) It works brilliantly in 99.9% of the cases :)

https://gist.github.com/tripzilch/5656025

Same point as ChrisLTD, but less nice. I don't like your position:fixed top header and will likely avoid your site because of it.

I agree. I switch to the desktop version whenever I can. And if I can't, I tend to avoid the page. But the reason is mostly different: Often I know the desktop version and offering me the mobile one means that I need to relearn where stuff is. I guess, that is different for people who go online on a mobile device, only.

I don't know about apple's offerings, but Chrome on Android has an option in the menu to request desktop version.

Plus, you can force-enable zoom for all sites in the accessibility settings.

I agree with all that.

One example of mobile zoom disabled is Gamasutra.

Not only zoom is disabled, but the fonts are tiny and tiresome to read.

Older versions of iOS had a bug where zoom levels would mess up when device orientation was changed. For a while disabling zoom was a reasonable alternative but it's not justifiable anymore

On the other points I think it's because a lot of companies are still treat their mobile UX as an afterthought, even the ones who wouldn't like to admit it. It's a lot of work to handle all the variables well and few are willing to commit the resources in the right places early enough to implement a good mobile experience without awkward technical workarounds later.

I find mobile sites are often tailored towards use cases that are very narrow and specific to what the site operators believe are the reasons a person would visit their site.

This sort of thinking leads to sites highly tailored for mobile that ignores a segment of their audience.

I made my legacy web pages (one almost 20 years old and including an image map) mobile-friendly by google's standards simply by adding a viewport. This had no impact on the usability of the site on a desktop, and only slightly changed the formatting (for the better) on my iPhone. I don't think that what Google is mandating here is a separate, crippled site for mobile devices.

I get instantly annoyed when I go to a site on my desktop browser and see the hamburger icon. Another huge annoyance is site with 5 break points.

Two thoughts:

First: I find it worrying that Google has enough power to dictate the direction of the internet is such profound ways. Remember when people would get up in arms when Microsoft created de facto standards?

Second: Doesn't this change only effect 'mobile searches' ? Reading the blog post [1] that is how I interpret it. I think the article could make this more clear.

[1] http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com.es/2015/02/findin...

It only affects users on Mobile. So 'mobile searches'

You probably have a source I don't, but the article says nothing about this only changing the ranking on mobile searches.

Sorry here is the FAQ: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2015/04/faqs-apri...

What about Apple changing the direction of Flash websites and Flash video on mobile? (when iOS was about 1/10 as big as it is today).

Yes, what about it? How does this makes Google's behavior any better? 2 * bad != good

How well did that work out? I mean, really? YouTube just completely switched from Flash, many other video sites are still pushing Flash or sometimes even Silverlight, HTML5 gaming has still yet to really take off the way Flash gaming did. All Apple did was push these interactions to native apps instead of on the web.

It's been what, 8 years since the iPhone was released, and Flash is still around. I didn't notice a huge decrease in Flash usage when Jobs made the announcement. It doesn't hurt that they have strong competition and Android can still to this day play Flash content if the user wants.

How big is Flash gaming these days? I feel like it's mostly dead at this point.

It's sort of been replaced by mobile apps, but there's still a lot of Flash out there. Kongregate is still a thing. Browser-based games are currently in this weird limbo state where the old tech is out of favor, but the new hotness (WebGL) really isn't ready yet.

The WebGL exports you currently get from Unity and UE4 are typically huge, slow, and often completely broken. I have no idea where the blame lies, but it's not pretty.

Do you actually play on Kongregate? I check it on occasion and have noticed that it hasn't really changed over the last five years. 90% of the games I see at a glance aren't any different.

I think it worked out pretty well actually.

So we waited eight years for Flash to die to the point where it is today. Meanwhile sites are changing now for Google's new algorithm. I don't think it's comparable at all.

> I find it worrying that Google has enough power to dictate the direction of the internet is such profound ways. Remember when people would get up in arms when Microsoft created de facto standards?

They're playing catch-up, not dictating. Mobile-friendly has been the rule not the exception for web developers for years.

This is what happens when your search engine monopoly also has a mobile OS.

Frankly, I hate most mobile sites. For most sites I just use an app or deal with the desktop site. On a 5" android phone, desktop browsing isn't bad. Its a shame companies with great mobile apps but non-mobile sites will be punished by this, yet half-assed responsive design sites will be rewarded.

I wish google would use its muscle for good once in a while. How about lowering the rank of sites that have all those in-page pop-ups? Or refuse content until you log in with a facebook or similar account? That's stuff real people complain about. The mobile stuff seems to have been taken care of for the most part and, frankly better, via Apple's approach of convincing everyone to buy an iphone and sites having to either serve them via apps or via mobile themes via customer demand.

Google's heavy-handed approach is pretty concerning. If users and the market aren't dying for mobile sites, why is google unilaterally forcing them down everyone's throats via the completely unrelated pagerank system? If sites are of poor quality, people won't link to them, and pagerank will work as designed. Google is just making modifications to help sell its Android product.

Sadly, this won't lead to some mobile renaissance (we already had one and its working fine). We're just going to get a lot of "SEO-optimized" crappy responsive design that will be a checkmark on a list of requirements no one really gives a shit about. Good mobile sites are hard. Get ready for the cookie-cutter mobile half-assery that will limit content, break functionality, etc just because everyone is chasing that precious pagerank value.

Not to mention, its not 2008 anymore. Everyone has a mobile site. Those that don't probably just can't afford one, like very small business and other edge cases (applications that are only used on desktops for niche needs and have no need for mobile). Google is just pissing on those least able to move swiftly in an ever changing technological world.

Google didn't create the switch to mobile, they are years late to the party. Apple initiated the mobile smartphone revolution. Now billions of people are coming online, many of whom never ever had a desktop with internet, especially in developing companies.

This is a disruptive change, and it is undeniable reality. Even if Google didn't change the mobile search ranking, eventually non-mobile ready sites would lose traffic from frustrated users picking alternatives that are mobile optimized. What would happen is, mobile users would say "man, Google Search sucks, every time I search for a site, it gives these horrible, slow to load, hard to use sites on my phone" At some point, a competitor, possibly even Apple, would release a mobile-ranked search engine.

Maybe they'll be a button to get the desktop results even on mobile, or maybe "Request Desktop Site" in the mobile browser will give you Google Desktop search. But to blame Google because you're going to eventually be forced to update your site is just laziness.

It's not Google who brought this on, it's your customers. They've changed their access patterns, and if you want your business to thrive, to you need to follow your customers. Sometimes that even means native apps in app stores.

I'd say this is a good wakeup call and really, Google took way too long to seriously target the mobile Web. Chrome only recently got Add to Home Screen and Push Notifications, two of the biggest things missing. We're now 8 years post iPhone (2007). The fact that Search ranking is just now, almost a decade later, targeting mobile friendly means Google was seriously lagging the usage patterns of most of the world.

I find it very hard to believe that people are blaming content on search engines. If a site doesn't look right, I blame the site. I also find it hard to justify that even if they did, that somehow Google has a responsibility to unilaterally police the web via pagerank punishments.

It's not that people blame Google for the site looking crappy, but they do blame Google if the top search results aren't useful -- and that includes the site being unusable. Google also makes a huge amount of its revenue off of pay-per-click display advertising, and if it's referring customers all day long (through organic search) to sites that don't convert, then it's bad for everyone.

This is nowhere near the first pagerank modifier based on site performance -- it's well-known that Google penalizes sites that are slow to load, because users click away from those sites more frequently.

> Or refuse content until you log in with a facebook or similar account? That's stuff real people complain about

Outside of the HN bubble, I've not seen (m)any people complain about this. Its not something most people care about really, as long as they can still access the content "for free"[1]

[1] - standard disclaimers apply.

Internet is one big case of Stockholm Syndrome. I'll leave the web developers love affair with crappy tech for another discussion; in case of users, I'm astonished by how much crap people are willing to tolerate because they think "it's how things are". Ads, more ads, crappy/spam sites, SEO, clickjacking... There is a huge market failure here, the signal about people being frustrated doesn't really travel upstream so everyone keeps pumping out even more crap.

You could argue that, in a sense, Google already punishes sites with annoying features like in-page popups and mandatory Facebook logins, in the same way it punishes all sites with annoying features - if you load a page and then hit the back button within a few seconds, Google knows the site it sent you to probably wasn't very useful and that will affect the page's rating. Add that to myriad other signals they use to detect whether you got value out of the site or not and I'd say they do a good job of punishing sites that people genuinely don't like.

What's probable though is is that although we don't like those things, other people aren't so bothered by them and still find utility in sites that use them, so Google doesn't punish them too much.

Well, to me, it makes perfect sense. If I am on a mobile phone, I want mobile-friendly websites higher.

I am actually quite surprised it's not working like that yet.

I wonder if this means Hacker News rankings will go down (considering it's almost impossible to read on a mobile device). That aside I think this is a great idea; the rank changes are limited to mobile search only and provide users with better results.

I'm only curious how they make the determination as to what site is or isn't mobile friendly. Is this programatic (I would have to assume it is) in which case how do they determine this? Some sites can make a good mobile site but they do it in an assbackwards fashion (e.g. using JavaScript only for resizing and reflowing); would those be counted? Does it require CSS device selectors or anything similar? I feel like it has to be a combination of things but would really like to know what.

For what it's worth, Hacker News works just fine on Windows Phone (mobile IE). I'd say it's one of the easier to read sites because it's ready in an instant and not busy adding layers 10 seconds after initial render, loading myriad JavaScript files, and injecting social media assets from third-party sites after I've already scrolled two pages down.

It loads fine in android too, it's just incredibly fiddly to click the comments link without clicking the story and you have to zoom to click the correct one of the up/down arrows. I'm pretty sure I've dished out a fair few down votes quite contrary to my actual intention over the last couple of years.

Anecdotal, but on my Windows Phone (admittedly, stuck on 7.8) the site was pretty much unusable.

It is not very easy to read on iPhone. I much prefer one of the mobile versions. http://m.imgur.com/a/i1YnG

Not all mobile sites. Try this on your wp8 or other mobile devices - Mobile Hacker news - http://hn.premii.com/

I don't think many people find HN from Google search!

https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/mobile-friendly/

Test your site with the above link.

Very helpful; thanks!

Extremely helpful thanks!

I had setup my robots.txt to disallow indexing of the Wordpress themes.. I had no idea that would make Google not use that to render the page, so it thought my site was not "mobile friendly".

Fixed!

I find the simplicity of HN a real plus on mobile. It's much easier to read on my iPhone than many 'mobile friendly' websites.

Sorry, I don't agree with the statement. Some of the HN apps are much better to use and I would be more than glad to use their Mobile Web version instead of the current HN desktop version.

In fact, I don't like the current desktop version as well. I mean it's clean and simple but the page is too wide, so when the comments are long, I find it hard to keep my eyes on the same line. And the tiny buttons - I have to point my mouse to that 10px by 10px button to upvote something. Is there something like Reddit Enhancement Suite for HN?

In fact, there's Hacker News Enhancement Suite [1]. Collapse threads, see which comments are new since your last view, etc.

[1] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hacker-news-enhanc...

I couldn't stand reading HN comments without collapsible comments. Trying to scroll past a top level comment chain that I didn't find interesting was very tedious.

Shame it's Chrome only.

Apparently it was only Chrome-users who cared enough to do something about their problem.

Found this for Firefox - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/hn-utility-su...

Thanks! This solves some of the issues I mentioned above.

Disagree. I use HN on mobile for it's speed, not readability. Would love it if HN had a least one media query to allow for better readability on mobile.

There are a couple of problems on mobile (Chrome, iOS). Some of these appear to be faults in mobile rendering rather than actual faults with HN.

1) posting a very long unbroken line means entire page is zoomed out to accommodate that single long line. This makes the site harder to use.

2) posting a single very long unbroken line starting with four spaces means the text will be partly hidden. This fixes (1) above but causes a user has to scroll the text to read it. Scrolling the text in that single line is either impossible or very hard. I don't have enough patience to test which.

3) some people find the fonts too small.

4) those tiny vote buttons are too close!!

Some things that other mobile sites do that I hate:

1) steal focus

2) not render any text until the entire multi megabyte set of html, css, javascript and images have all downloaded.

3) start displaying text and then hide it until something happens.

Plain text is not accessible, but I've started to think that I would prefer just raw text than most of the websites I get served.

> I wonder if this means Hacker News rankings will go down (considering it's almost impossible to read on a mobile device).

I think that many would receive this as a feature, not a bug. Part of the reason why HN looks the way it looks is to not become a popular site attracting too many visitors.

I pretty much only read HN on mobile...

I updated an older website last month that was built on a static 960 grid and converted it to a responsive layout by doing the following:

* Split the framework's grid CSS from the actual website styles.

* Used media queries to conditionally load the framework's grid.css only on larger devices and load a dedicated mobile.css on smaller devices.

The mobile.css focuses on improving the mobile experience by increasing the spacing of elements, converting display properties to "block" (where appropriate), and hiding extraneous design elements (ideally, this should be done on the server prior to downloading), collapse the navbar into a slidedown "hamburger" menu, increasing font-sizes and clickable area's on links.

Google's Web Fundamentals for Multi-Device Layouts (https://developers.google.com/web/fundamentals/layouts/?hl=e...) and Mobile-Friendly Test (https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/mobile-friendly/) were very helpful.

I would love to hear more about how you did this: collapse the navbar into a slidedown "hamburger" menu.

Can you point me to any resources for doing it? Thanks.

I'm not grandparent but usually people have a hidden nav that shows on smaller screens using media queries

Check out Bootstrap's 'Default navbar' example. It does this. http://getbootstrap.com/components/#navbar-default

Sure. In the default desktop page, the navigation menu is a traditional horizontal navbar (a styled unordered list).

* When the media query for mobile devices is triggered, the mobile.css is loaded which, among other things mentioned above, hides the navbar and overrides the previous styling in the embedded list with: .navlist li { display: block; margin: 15px 0; text-align: center;}. The new CSS changes the layout of the navlist to a centered, vertical list.

* Another div with an id of #mobilemenu (hidden by default in the desktop css) is absolutely positioned in the top right corner of the page. That div contains a small hamburger menu png icon.

* jQuery is used to capture the click event and toggle the mobile navigation menu: $("#mobilemenu").click(function () { $(".navlist").slideToggle(500); });

So, am I right in understanding this to mean that Google will change how they rank sites, adding (more?) weight to a site's mobile-friendliness, even if queried from a non-mobile machine?

That doesn't make a lot of sense to me at first, and doesn't seem to be what's necessarily best for users.

If I search for something on my 1920x1200-pixel desktop, I don't want Google to prioritize results that display well (and thus might contain less information) on mobile screens.

So I guess (and hope) I'm wrong, and it's just me reading badly, or poor reporting. :)

I heard it will only affect rankings when searched from a mobile device. This excludes tablets and desktop class devices.

In effect a business has a choice to make, do they want to be down ranked on 50% of searches because they choose not to give a good experience to the devices doing the search.

Isn't a tablet a mobile device ?

Google decided a while ago that user search behavior on tablet is more similar to desktop than mobile...that's why in AdWords mobile is a separate bid modifier but your desktop targeting cannot be seperated from tablet.

Google has said (or at least: it has been widely reported) that the impact will be on the mobile results only. That's not to say that will always be true, though.

"On April 21, 2015, Google will release a significant new mobile-friendly ranking algorithm that’s designed to give a boost to mobile-friendly pages in Google’s mobile search results."

http://searchengineland.com/library/google/google-mobile-fri...

It's explicity limited to mobile search:

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2015/02/finding-m...

> This change will affect mobile searches in all languages worldwide [...]

True.

Though: we speculate that it may eventually come to affect all searches - as mobile-friendliness becomes more pervasive (and hence as non-mobile-friendliness becomes an outlier), we anticipate that they may prefer a good mobile-friendly result to an equivalent non-mobile friendly result even on the desktop.

The main user-centric argument for this is the increasing amount of multi-screening (i.e. returning to the same page on multiple devices) as well as sharing a link via email or social (where the recipient is highly-likely to open it on mobile at least some of the time).

Yup CTR on mobile would help the domain overall.

I'd love to just permanently change my user agent on the iPhone so I don't have to deal with stuff like this.

The iPhone was designed to read full sized sites and I think it works great. I hate mobile sites.

Here's a great example. A mobile friendly page for the Harmony of the Gospels. It's supposed to be a simple chart: four columns, one for each book, then you look at the rows to see if a particular part of the story is present in a book. The mobile friendly site stack the columns linearly down the page -- totally useless, but I guess it will rank higher now.

https://www.lds.org/scriptures/harmony

Yeah the 6+ is big enough that it can get by on desktop viewing. I'm guessing the average mobile screen size has been steadily increasing and will continue to in future.

Changing your user agent won't do a darned thing.

Modern mobile-friendly designs use CSS media queries to change styling based on screen dimensions.

That makes sense to me. Sites really should be designed to look good on mobile then adjust them so they also look good and function well (often with additional, lower priority content) on larger displays.

For a few years I have used Bootstrap as a starting point, and as a refresher I am taking the edX Bootstrap class right now. The course emphasises a mobile first approach. In addition to making web dev easier I also really like Bootstrap because it is so common that users instantly know how to navigate and use a site. A nice way to show content.

I still hate websites tailored for mobile devices. I can't believe Google is encouraging companies to do this and penalizing those that do not. Almost every single website that I go to that I notice is different on mobile is different is ways that frustrate me to no end. Off the top of my head I can't think of a single website where I prefer the mobile version on a mobile device over the full version on a mobile device. I'm not saying they don't exist, just that they are extremely rare.

The tooling provided by Google is extremely frustrating to use -- as a developer on a large content site where we are taking this seriously. I can't believe that they will simply apply your "pagespeed insights" score to your search ranking, they must have much more nuanced scoring mechanisms.

For example, their crawler seems to not understand picture elements at all, and they're penalizing us (6 points) for offering retina options at all (saying that we need to resize the images).

I've been looking for information on how Google is determining mobile friendliness.

That is, are they viewing your site with a mobile agent (that reveals itself as being on mobile), or are they using their present setup and judging your site by its characteristics such as font size (etc)?

The reason I'm curious, is that a lot of sites do on the fly adjustments for mobile based on the client signature. Others prefer to use the forward to mobile m.whatever.com approach. I almost have to assume Google is smart enough to take all of this into account and to spider sites via a bot made just for mobile.

https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/mobile-friendly/

https://developers.google.com/webmasters/mobile-sites/refere...

I have a huge aversion to mobile sites. It's like consuming the Internet through a straw. I want to be able to zoom out and see the overall structure of the page with a pinch of my fingers! My eyes and screens have retina resolution, so I don't mind small fonts. The worst is when you have to scroll all the way down to find the link to the desktop version, or when the site depends on the device-width in the viewport meta tag so that the "request desktop version" function has no effect on iOS. Sigh.

What I don't get is this. Isn't Google supposed to rank websites based on the predicted relevance of the result for the user's query? And what would the (supposed, as it is clear from many comments) mobile friendliness have to do with this?

Would a website that contains less reliable information, or more confused content, or that is less popular among the users themselves, be ranked higher than a better one just because it scales down nicely on a small screen?

Google ranks websites using hundred of signals with different weights. I bet a more relevant website is always going to trump less relevant ones, regardless of how mobile friendly they are.

But if a more relevant website is always going to trump a less relevant one (where for relevant I mean: contains the answer to the question the user has submitted) - then what is the effect of bumping mobile friendly websites? None, it would seem - unless there were two websites perfectly identical in every respect except for mobile friendliness, a case that must be pretty rare.

If A and B are identical in all aspects except for mobile-friendliness (A > B), most users are going to like A better than B, given that information is laid out in a more easily consumable format on mobile [1].

User satisfaction not only depends on getting a relevant answer, but also how an answer is presented. Their degree of importance is where the weights come in.

[1] Otherwise, why would anyone build mobile-friendly websites in the first place?

My reading is that this will affect searching on mobile devices. It would seem relevant to bump up results that will actually deal well with said mobile user accessing them.

>It would seem relevant to bump up results that will actually deal well with said mobile user accessing them

If you need to "bump them up" it means their ranking is lower - that is, they're (supposed to be) less relevant. It's arguable it's a good service for the user.

> It's arguable it's a good service for the user.

Does the user want to click on a link to a relevant site that their device cannot adequately access?

But serving me mobile content is now giving me a worse experience.

I get a site that's less relevant, and I have to fight against an unintuitive UI and disabled zoom amd fixed banners and all the other weird stupid things people do to mobile sites.

"Modern" "mobile-first" web design boils down to "Powerpoint in a browser".

While there are of course relevant use cases, I have a hard time considering them primary... But as usual I'm afraid I am not the target audience...

Entire "modern" web design, whether mobile or not, starts to look like a "PowerPoint in a browser" - with expected lack of any essence. The web is ruled by marketers now. But, like you, I'm probably also not the target audience...

Anyone else bothered by the fact that the format is being placed above the content? If I were cynical I would say that google has given up on trying to find good content and have retreated to optimizing over things they can measure. Sure, if there are two identical data sources then give me the pretty one, but if some horribly ugly website has exactly the knowledge I'm looking for it had bettered show up first.

In order to appease Google's new mobile friendly algorithm, business owners and web designers have been rushing to "convert" their websites as quickly and cheaply as possible, without thinking about the usability factors required to make a website truly mobile friendly.

- You get mobile websites that serve massive graphics that take forever to load on mobile.

- You get mobile E-commerce websites with usability disasters during checkout.

- You get responsive websites with key visuals scaled down to minuscule promotions

- You get websites with less information and content available on entry

- You get to play hide and seek with hamburger navigation

- You get hosting companies offering free utilities and low cost services to convert website to mobile "point and click"

- You get websites where the full version is still more friendly.

Sure, a high quality mobile website can be a great way to improve key performance metrics. Businesses typically see increased conversation rates, decreased bounce rates etc. with their mobile users.

But only when the mobile website is done "right".

With businesses rushing to get this done ASAP there's a good chance it's not being done right - even if they still get that shiny green checkmark from Google.

And if the "full website" is performing just fine with mobile users, what's the rush to offer a separate version?

Google said so I suppose. Even it means a less friendly website.

  - You get mobile E-commerce websites with usability disasters during checkout.

To be fair, I think going through desktop-version checkout process on mobile is very much worse. If an e-commerce company can't get its checkout process right, then it deserves to lose customers.

At least when I use the desktop site I am confident that all of the site's functionality is available, and that the interface is probably not just broken and unusable due to bugs, which is surprisingly common on mobile websites. I guess people don't test mobile websites as much, and the increased dynamicity of mobile layouts and diversity of behavior among mobile browsers increases the probability of bugs...

Is this the death of m dot sites and associated redirects?

Nope, though I'm sure many would love that, and many more would benefit.

The provided Mobile Friendly Test does not penalize redirects, currently: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/mobile-friendly/

Kinda lame and not in line with what made PageRank so successful. Google should "not be evil" and have the decency to be as neutral as possible, allowing legitimate clicks and backlinks to judge the relevance of a website. If people can't stand websites that aren't tailored to mobile devices, they will simply leave and find another. I personally don't mind viewing a 20-year-old website through a little mobile browser if the content is satisfactory.

If they are to change anything in this area, they should simply put a little distinguishing checkmark by a mobile-friendly search result, but leave the rankings unchanged. And this should obviously be the case only when a user is on a mobile device.

I think your comment is especially true when you think less of websites that make money and are actively maintained and more about the wealth of information that's out there on old websites that haven't been touched for years -- but may still be valuable resources.

> If people can't stand websites that aren't tailored to mobile devices, they will simply leave and find another

Yes, and the fifth time in a row I have to do that I stop thinking "these are shitty websites" and start thinking "this is a shitty search engine".

Search engines are inherently not neutral. Why should a spammy site, filled with ads and ripped-off content from different sites, not score higher if it has higher PageRank? Because, again, that's not what you as a user wants. That's far more important for what a "good search engine" is than some idea of neutrality based entirely on how many other sites link to a page.

Note that there absolutely be a balance here, but that seems to be exactly what is going on. This is just one more weight on the ranking, same as their earlier adjustment for site load speed.

In some ways this makes perfect sense. Instead of saying it's penalizing un-mobile-friendly sites, you could say it's referencing mobile-friendly.

But, paradoxically, so many "mobile-friendly" sites are so much worse than their non-mobile selves.

I found that when using my iPhone 6S I really do not want to browse "mobile friendly" websites. I actually prefer websites which do not have that.

For example, Google News is 10x better if it is not mobile friendly: I can see overview, with pics, etc.

Am I the only one?

Just depends on the site. Some mobile sites just remove all functionality. For example, the "mobile" version of a dealership site I tried to go to a couple of years ago didn't have any contact information on it. I had to access the desktop version of the site to find out how to contact them.

And a million pointless SEO guys just got erections.

Every small business in America is about to get billed.

What would make more sense than blindly prioritizing mobile sites is this:

1) Desktop-friendly websites appear higher in the rankings for searches made from desktop computers

2) Mobile-friendly websites appear higher in the rankings for searches made from mobile devices

That's what they're doing: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2015/04/faqs-apri...

I see, thanks. Makes sense.

To be fair, it was misleading that the WSJ article said "Google is changing its search algorithm Tuesday to favor sites that look good on smartphones."

I've been watching sites' traffic and mobile Google search rankings (just finished looking at over 100 site's Google Analtyics) and am not seeing ANY changes. Looks like it hasn't been rolled out yet, even though Google said it was going to be April 21st.

Confirmed with Gary Illyes from Google, it's actually starting to roll out today and could be weeks...

There's a been a lot of geddons recently.

At least they're not calling it mobile-gate or whatever.

I've been looking for this comment :)

HN doesn't usually tolerate top-level joke comments, but I figured this would pass muster.

The announcement should have been made quietly and incrementally over time. Many small businesses do not like being dictated to by large ones (even if it may be in their interest).

This should play out in an interesting way. There's a lot of niche ecommerce opportunities that are about to open up if this turns out to be as bad as penguin...

All pages are mobile friendly, and 90% of mobile user all they do is facebook and instagram...

Go Mobile or Go Home

Meh, they said the same thing about pagespeed and it was meaningless.

It's against Google's nature to purposefully diminish their search results' relevance, ergo $$$ and engagement.

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