Google to Hacker News: Not Mobile-Friendly
google.com
google.com
The pixel-perfect coupling that people expect between what a site should look like according to the designers and how that site is rendered by the browsers is an illusion, that's not the way the web was supposed to work at all, web sites provide information and loose markup hints and browsers then render that information in the best way suitable for the device and its user.
Don't blame the website, blame the browser instead.
Ironically, looking at ancient (pre-CSS, pre table based layouts) websites through modern browsers gives you instant adaptive design because all there was was content, no eye candy.
If we had wanted pixel based rendering we could have done a damn sight better than CSS, style sheets and markup are hints, not ultimatums to be obeyed or failure will occur.
Just think about the burden that these demands make on older websites, websites that worked perfectly well in the past suddenly need to be modified in order to be displayed properly, that's a total inversion of the way things are supposed to work. Old content and older websites should be displayed with as high fidelity as possible on newer browsers and devices. You can't fault the makers of old websites for not being 'future compatible' but you can fault the makers of new devices and browsers for not being compatible with the past.
Mobile browsers should offer a custom style option, or at least a "no style" option like FF does.
Sidenote: Is it possible at all to have horizontal scrolling websites that Google consideres mobile friendly? Some websites are intended to have a horizontal scroll. What are they supposed to do?
Mobile friendly isn't a meme, it's just a description of how well your chosen presentation of content translates into a different context of use. Context changes often require different choices about how you break up your content to throw at someone - this has been the case since the web began.
Shifting the layout burden to content supplied (and or javascript) was/is a huge mistake, the browser on the device should do the layout using whatever style hints it feels are appropriate.
Works well, looks identical on all devices, is future proof: pick any two.
Pointer-driven UI and touchscreen UI have different local maxima. One of the reasons Ubuntu's Unity looks like it does is because they intend for it to look and work well on both UI types.
(OTOH, the up/down buttons on HN are not desktop friendly either)
Perhaps an alternative would be some declaration that says "Hey render me this way if you feel like it, but use these all powerful browser supplied styles if I become unreadable"
Some browser's have implemented that reading mode (safari?) and it seems like a cool idea, but I think it only works if you provide really good HTML5 markup.
if it were a display protocol then we could have kept things a lot simpler, specify display width, height and DPI in the request, get back a compressed image and a bunch of 'hot zones' or 'fields' in response. Such protocols existed and they did not make the cut, the one that did explicitly left the rendering decisions to the client receiving the data.
Websites are not pixel perfect renditions created by dictates issued from servers, they are streams of information decorated with meta-data that give hints on how the information could be rendered.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypertext
> A browser can not predict the particulars of my design well enough to make those decisions for me.
On the contrary, you are not capable of predicting the context in which the information you supply will be used, so less design is better. If you want pixel perfect eye candy write an application but don't use the web, it's lossy by design, for all you know your information will be presented in an audible rather than a readable form, will be printed out on a printer that does not support colour and/or will be read with a device 10,000 years into the future.
Your design is not relevant, the information is what is relevant.
Note that in the case of content such as 'flash', 'silverlight' and other plug-in related content this is going to be a major problem.
Finally, in the interest of commerce and user experience website owners are free to improve their sites to enhance the experience for their users but they should not be required to get basic functionality working.
The "let the browser decide" ship has sailed, and the designers won (with our support, I might add). All we can do now is use those a same tools to take back control.
The address bar takes up a lot of vertical space that could be better used to show more lines of text. That big block of empty white space on the previous item next item close menu bar is also wasted.
If Google really wants to fix browsing on mobile they might want to look at their own products as well as using their seo powers.
If you resize desktop browser window you see that is scales well. The width is set to 85%.
I assume that most popular mobile web browsers render HN the same. This could mean that there are some standards for mobile devices that make it look as bad as it is. Unless you are someone who really wants to and can change the standard I assume that you start complying with it. :)
And: It pisses me off to no end that Google is in the position to decide how a site has to look like on $device.
They announce that you will get a worse SERP if your site doesn't do X and everyone scrambles to please mighty G.
If they decide that every site has to have a yellow background, starting next week, what will you do? Give in?
However, if they are right, and the users _do_ want to see sites optimised for mobile, it means that while you are right technically about how mobile browsers are supposed to work, and how sites are supposed to work, the real users just don't agree with you.
It seems easy to just add the tag and a few CSS rules - but what if this is a still useful page from 2005 which I have forgotten about?
As a developer, you should define which content should scale and/or resize according to browser viewport width and pixel density: Better known as "Responsive".
Mobile browser should render the page exactly how the designer specified.
edit: hello downvoters, would you be equally upset that a windows 95 machine would refuse to run office 2000?
The device's web browser should attempt to adapt the page to fit the device rather than the site telling the browser how it should adapt to the size of the screen.
And that's ignoring for the moment the burden of testing a website on all possible devices (which is the way we nowadays go about developing commercial websites, and which is entirely wrong, if a website works on one browser it should work on all, a ship which has long ago sailed but which made good sense at the time and was one of the main reasons the web caught on over all those proprietary and fragmented efforts at information dissemination that preceded it).
Considering that the problem exists in the present and is very real, I'm not sure why not being able to write future-proof CSS is a big issue. How often do commonly-used CSS properties (e.g. font-size) become outdated? When was the last time you had to re-write the stylesheets on one of your websites?
>>And that's ignoring for the moment the burden of testing a website on all possible devices
I think the HN userbase is not only capable but also would be willing to perform this testing. Deploy the website on a separate directory (e.g. news.combinator.com/newdesign/etc.) and direct users who opt into the beta there.
Heck, I bet there's quite a few people here who would love to take it on as a volunteer project.
Case in point: the geocities files that were backed-up and are on display from a variety of sources (including mine, but also the internet archive and archive team) are static, no longer in maintenance. The same goes for all of the internet archive. If you want to see that content at any point in the future you had better hope that the browsers are the ones to adapt to the past because the past is certainly not going to adapt to the browser and as the web ages there will only be more of the past and relatively speaking less of the present.
The web is aging rapidly and the current development of modern browsers on modern devices failing to render sites that are only a few years old properly is a worrisome one.
HN is in fact one of the least affected sites in this respect.
But then iPhone happened.
I honestly don't know, so maybe dang or kogir could clue us in. If a significant number of users are on mobile, and it's reasonable to expect that number to increase for the foreseeable future, then placating mobile users makes sense. I doubt that increasing their SEO is really a priority for the HN staff either way.
Also, two out of the three issues on the google site come down to simple typography and UX. Elements being too close together (links, line-height to add my own personal pet peeve) or too small (font size and the oft-complained about vote arrows) or too poorly contrasted (grey text on a lighter grey background) making things difficult to read and navigate. I don't see anything wrong with improving the readability of a site which is meant to be read... that makes the experience better for everyone.
How many possible ways is there for a site to make itself hard to read on a small screen?
How many rules would a mobile browser need to have to handle them all?
How smart would these rules need to be to distinguish between intentional and unintentional design decisions?
It's beyond question that websites should be coded in such a way that they works on a range of devices screen sizes. Anything else is madness.
Two bookmarks for different browsers, no big trouble. I actually like the old school table based layout of HN. One of the things that stay the same. And it works great with Vimium^_^
I think both iOS and Android have already a plethora of user-made apps. (some of them ok, some of them not ok)
On a tablet i prefer the HN website to any of the apps currently available. On a phone, I think there are a few good Android apps and no good enough iOS apps...
What is the best HN experience on mobile? I think there's need for better understanding of what we "want" from mobile, apart from the obvious things (i.e. readability)
[2] https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/mobile-friendly/?url...
Just bunch of easily reflowed text and a bit of ASCII art. Browser on my Nokia N900 shows it just fine, zooming is usable, everything seems "friendly". If Nokia could do it on Maemo long time ago, why Apple and Google can't do it now?
We can't have it both ways.