Comment by jallmann | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jallmann | Hacker News Reader

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Curmudgeon time: reflow and zoom were probably my favorite features of the original Motorola Droid browser. There were zoom ( +, - ) buttons in the lower-right to zoom in and out -- accessible one handed, with your thumb, none of that pinch-to-zoom nonsense. And the text reflowed on zoom!

Further iterations of Android slowly stripped out these features -- first the buttons went, in favor of pinch-to-zoom, then reflow in favor of... a worse user experience.

Most sites with a lot of horizontal text (hello, HN!) are hard to read in portrait mode without constantly scrolling. Phones are faster than ever, I don't see why computational requirements would be a good reason for disabling reflow. Turn off all those damn animated-transparent-rounded transitions and give me back my reflow.

As far as I can tell, none of the major mobile OSes (Android, iOS, Windows Phone) ship with text reflow in the browser by default. Well, except HTC Android, according to the article. And that is maddening.

On Android, in most places where you can zoom (browsers, Maps, etc.) you can zoom one-handed with a double-tap (where the second tap is held down and dragged up or down to zoom in or out before releasing). It's actually a pretty smooth interaction once you know to do it.

I've used android for years and never knew you could do this. This is one of the things I hate most about all those gestures : there's no way to know about them unless you just try a bunch of random things, or you google for "android browser gestures" or something like that. Give me buttons to do the same things those gestures do! Hide them behing menu if you want, but give me functionality that I can use right now without having to hunt for them on the web.

From google maps on my one plus. Menu > "Tips and Tricks" > "Zoom in and out in more ways than one." I didn't know about it either, but it took a minute to find the how to explanations. Personally I prefer standardized gestures to buttons to save the screen space, but thats just me.

Another gesture you'd never know you could do - double tap with two fingers will zoom out in google maps (e.g., the inverse of double tap with one finger). I think this works on both Android and iOS.

FWIW this also works in Google Maps for iOS. I wish it worked system wide.

This is kind of system wide on iOS. Almost all apps that support zoom supports double tapping to zoom in. Safari zooms into the HTML element you double tapped on and fits it nicely on the screen.

If it helps, double-tap (or sometimes long-press) to zoom occurs in many photo apps on various platforms.

Yes, this gesture is actually amazingly better than pinch-to-zoom, my only annoyance with it at present is that Android Firefox doesn't implement it - the only app on the entire platform that doesnt have it.

No idea why they think it's OK to ignore system wide standard gestures for years, but it's an obviously improvement that can't take much work to put in place.

The removed text reflow function in Android brought me to tears and Google does not intend to fix it.[1]

Opera for Android is the only option that does this really good right now (in a browser that doesn't feel like a malware data collector).

Lightning browser (open source) released an update this week that brought text reflow to post Kit Kat devices, but the way the text reflow works doesn't come close to the original Android implementation or Opera. Just try it on Hacker News.

[1] https://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=62378

I use Opera Mobile on Android since it is available. The only reason for me is that the zooming and reflow works like I want it to.

same here the text reflow is a must, it also has my favorite tab management of the mobile browsers

Try Lightning. Its a bit buggy and unfortunately put tabs at the top (whyyyy ..) but zooming and reflow are like opera mobile assuming you mean the classic one, not the one with random font sizes.

My experience is that Lightning text reflow doesn't work at all like pre Kit Kat Web View text reflow. How have you configured Lightning?

Hm, what exactly are you looking for? I am on 2.3 so maybe it's just using some OS provided stuff, if so, sorry for the useless suggestion. For me it seems similar to what I remember from the stock browser and the good old opera mobile before the drama (rip...).

Reflow works on mine (4.2.2 android, default browser). You need to pinch to zoom, but then a double tap reflows. [It took a while to stumble across it, and then another while to realize what that sudden weird thing actually was.]

NB: I have Settings->Avanced->"Auto-fit pages' checked (4th from bottom). Maybe that helps.

It works pretty well, but as others have said, apart from indented (or monospaced "code") text.

BTW: double tap and move up/down to zoom doesn't work in that broswer (though it does on the Google Maps app).

Yes, Google removed that feature in Android 4.4, breaking the user experience and not going to fix it again:

https://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=62378#c11...

This HN comment thread is unintentionally funny because of all the people talking about a thing that got removed in a version after the one they have, and saying "well I don't know what you're talking about!" Yeah, you don't. Sheesh.

Reflow on pages with indented text, as HN, is a borderline mess. More often then not the text is reflowed but the indent preserved, thus requiring horizontal scrolling to bring the full text into view...

Which is the proper way to do it... The alternative being ending up with a 1-character wide column of text.

Except that people want reflow exactly to avoid having to do horizontal scrolling.

Then again, most of the time what is wanted is not so much zoom as the ability to bump up the font size.

I want reflow to avoid mid-line horizontal scrolling. I don't really care if each block of text gets offset.

Yeah, exactly. I want one chunk of text to be legible in one frame. I don't care if I have to scroll chunk-to-chunk.

This doesn't solve the reflow problem, but you can double tap to zoom, too.

I always forget Android supports pinch. I never use it, myself (don't like needing my other hand except when typing).

iOS Safari sometimes increases text size automagically.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6210788/how-to-avoid-ios-...

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