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Ask HN: Why is HN not mobile friendly yet?

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31–40 of 59 posts

Re: Ask HN: Why is HN not mobile friendly yet?

#31
Yes, it will happen. Yes, we're working on it. The reasons it's taking so long are: (1) the change required is not tiny; and (2) everyone working on it has many other things to do, most of which are more pressing.

That doesn't make it a low priority (it's a high priority), but it means we have to do it as a background process.

Re: Ask HN: Why is HN not mobile friendly yet?

#32
One change that could be made is to wrap very long unbroken lines.

Visiting /comments when someone has left a post with a very long unbroken line will break the site.

Browsers are oddly broken for mobile. Here's what text entry looks like on Chrome for iOS - http://imgur.com/gjLdS6A

Re: Ask HN: Why is HN not mobile friendly yet?

#33
post #2

I've found this site as one of the easier to use ones on mobile?

Hacker News does not have a responsive layout, which is generally what is considered "mobile friendly" in 2015.

Also sizes: fonts, controls. I don't understand how people can call "mobile-friendly" site with extra small font and horizontal scroll - maybe they hate own eyes or it's hidden form of masochism?

Re: Ask HN: Why is HN not mobile friendly yet?

#35
post #26
post #13

In the meanwhile, this is super mobile and tablet-friendly: http://cheeaun.github.io/hackerweb/ I've been using it for more than a year now and I nearly never visit it Hacker News directly on mobile.

Have a look at this too - http://hn.premii.com/

There is also an Android app by this premii person, and it re-directs all links through its own domain. Very annoying and actually borderline malicious.

Re: Ask HN: Why is HN not mobile friendly yet?

#37

There is a ton of HN apps on Android, but all I want is the ability to post comments, post stories, and possibly support the Android share API so I can just send URLs to HN directly from Chrome.

"Yarn for Hacker News" can both comment and post from Android devices. And using the browser share bottun, you can post stories to HN. Also can open comment links from other apps. It's very useful, but only hope it would be able to change font size. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=au.com.timmutt...

Re: Ask HN: Why is HN not mobile friendly yet?

#38
I miss easy navigation features of a desktop browser when opening HN website in mobile browsers.

My flow is - I go through the submissions in a page, and when I like one, most of the time I open the story and its comments page both - in separate tabs. I read the story first and the switch to the next tab to read the comments. When I have completed all the tabs, I go to the next HN page. In mobile it's pretty cumbersome to navigate among tabs.

I seldom use the mobile site, I find the HN reader app by premii[1] the best suited for me.

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

Re: Ask HN: Why is HN not mobile friendly yet?

#39
post #29
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Making a one-column text-only website work on mobile is trivial with a meta tag and a few lines of CSS.

There are two columns: one for the text and one for the vote buttons. Does that affect your version? (What are those few lines of CSS btw?)

On such a simple site it's enough to set max-width on the whole body and maybe adjust a few elements such as the comment input box.

These max-widths etc. can be different based on available screen width: https://css-tricks.com/css-media-queries/

The meta tag can be used to set viewport width to device screen width. Without it, the mobile browser doesn't know what minimum screen width the webpage requires, so it assumes 800px (or 1024px), because rendering a random website with viewport width of 240px is not a good idea even in 2015.

My point is, browsers should be doing what the website code tells them to do. Websites that display nicely on desktop computers usually display fairly nicely on mobile as well. But HN shows 20-30 words per line on desktop, which is... suboptimal for readability, so it's only expected that mobile browsers produce similar results.

Re: Ask HN: Why is HN not mobile friendly yet?

#40
I wonder if mobile web is really ready. I think on mobile, people prefer the fullness that comes with native apps, including UI features like back/undo on Android, which is maybe why 37 Signals, once a staunch advocate of mobile web apps, decided to release native versions of their app after a few years. In default mobile browsers, the back button is not the same thing as "undo" in Android.
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