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Comment by Cyph0n | Hacker News Reader

Really now. Open HN in a mobile browser and tell me you don't have to squint to read at the default zoom level.

HN is a bad example seeing as the maintainers refuse to put in the small amount of effort it would take to make it work decently on mobile.

I think the way conversations thread would be pretty hard to do comfortably on mobile

Reddit manages OK. I wonder what level of petitioning would be required to get the admins to fix HN? Or are all the cool kids using an app which avoids this problem?

Which version of Reddit? Reddit, Reddit Mobile, or Reddit Mobile Beta?

https://reddit.com/.compact is the one I use.

That's no reason not to try. There are always ways to improve.

I agree. I think there are two distinct usability issues to address: content size and font size. That is, how much real estate the virtual viewport occupies in proportion to the display AND the size of font relative to the reader's ability to read comfortably. The trick is sensible adjustments to style attributes to keep layout working properly on the vast majority of devices no matter the zoom level or default font size, within reason.

As a user example, when I load the HN front-page on an iOS device in portrait mode, I'm lazy and switch to rotate to landscape mode to see more without trimming edges and scrolling around. On most sites, I expect to be able to double-tap on a paragraph column to toggle maximize-fit-to-display-width mode and return regular all-content-on-display-width mode.

If some site prevents this, I will not buy their products or use their services, because it's a signal they don't care about usability and will inevitably waste people's time. That's a form of laziness and failure that should not be rewarded. There are usually competitors that want you to switch to their brand (except with govts). Those annoying jQuery Mobile one-sized-fits-all sites deployed by pharmacies, banks, govts and so on.

Regardless, OP should have thought about the site he's posting on.

At least pinch-zoom is functional.

Functional, but not usable (as you have to scroll a bunch of times to read each line).

That depends on your browser.

Yes, I see Chrome has a reasonable default width, whereas the stock android browser is pretty much unusable.

I think it's a pretty good example. While site designers should take care to make their stuff look good on small screens, the devices with small screens should also allow users to make adjustments for when the designer didn't do this (or they did, but the user has special requirements). Mobile Safari doesn't even have a text size adjustment, for example. This is madness!

The sad thing is, they fixed this a while ago with a stylesheet that adjusted the page width and text size to fit your display, but reverted it after a bunch of people whined hard.

I don't know the reasons why, but on my phone on both Chrome and Firefox the text size is drastically different between comments. I ended up going with the Dolphin browser for HN because it maintains a consistent text size, but I changed the settings on the browser to use the maximum text size. The main negative with this has been certain unzoomable pages having a paragraph less than the width of my phone and only showing a few words per line, causing me to have to scroll constantly as I read. Unless the content is really good, I normally just skip these. As long as they are zoomable, there hasn't been forced white space / margins added to the paragraph (shortening the already too short paragraph width, apparently gleaned from my phone screen size), or the text is reasonably sized (not too big), other pages work just fine though. Also, the Dolphin gesture feature is fun! (I have HN set to a y gesture)

On a side note, some of the best experiences I've personally had browsing on my phone have been through VNC, if I have a good network connection. I realize that a lot of the processing gets offloaded from the phone this way, but I would really just like a more desktop-like experience on my phone. I have always been annoyed by apps that are basically just websites...The browser is often the only app I need. And mobile websites just frustrate me because they often take away features of the desktop version or make me have to use it in a completely different way and make it obnoxiously difficult to switch back (some random link at the bottom, or having to go settings -> request desktop version -> retype the url because it was changed to a mobile one -> reload the page). Browsers have had ways to change the "User Agent", but more and more this feature is either removed or doesn't even work.

I'm using Chrome on an iPhone 6, and I can read it just fine fully zoomed out with the phone at arm's length..

I still think that the industry trend has been towards zooming, rather than in-place size adjustment.

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