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Just because I have a vertical screen doesn’t mean I’m on a phone

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Re: Just because I have a vertical screen doesn’t mean I’m on a phone

#251

Post by speedgoose »

TomSwirly wrote: post #249
awillen wrote: post #151

As a product manager, my immediate response is... not worth the time. You've chosen to have a unique setup, which is fine, but your use case represents some absolutely miniscule fraction of users. On top of that, it's not even that websites are unusable, just that they're not ideal. When you decide to do weird/special/unique stuff, don't expect the world to adapt to you. You can rotate your monitor back or live with…

> You've chosen to have a unique setup, But is this unique? Lots of people prefer to have windows that are significantly taller than wide - just like books are. I'd love to see some hard data on this. > The idea that companies should spend engineering/QA/PM resources to deal with this is... vain. /eyeroll

The author gets a mobile layout not because of the portrait mode but because of zooming on the websites. Most responsive websites do not care about whether the screen is in portrait or landscape.

Re: Just because I have a vertical screen doesn’t mean I’m on a phone

#252

Post by ryandrake »

asddubs wrote: post #215
nobleach wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, and webdevs have been trying for over 10 years now to figure out how to get this right. Has no one just stopped to consider having a browser send a `prefersMobileView` or `viewport:phone` or anything like that? I can remember back a few years ago, an iPhone 6+, turned sideways could get a desktop view on some sites... simply because it met the requirements set by the author. Now, the author's assumptions were wr…

IMO the best solution is to just have natural breakpoints (i.e. when a part of the design of the given page would cease to work, add a breakpoint to change the format of that component, rather than at predefined points) and then for logged in users have an option to request the desktop design, which you can do by simply setting a viewport to 1000px width and leaving everything else unchanged what would be really nice…

I think we really need to be able to more cleanly separate content from the design, and let the browsers, a.k.a. user-agents, decide/override more. Browsers have ceded too much control over layout and visual structure to web designers, who go on to make (often incorrect) assumptions about how the user wants to interact with their content.

Re: Just because I have a vertical screen doesn’t mean I’m on a phone

#254

Post by brundolf »

esrauch wrote: post #246
brundolf wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would add to this that the specific sites in question have fairly unreasonable media-queries: The Guardian breaks to mobile at 980px, and Just Eat at 1024px . On my MacBook Pro with default scaling, these are both more than 50% the width of the monitor; i.e. if I size the window to half-screen, I'm in mobile mode on these sites. For reference, in sites I make I usually set the mobile breakpoint closer to 768px (not…

iphoneX looks like it has a css px width of 812px. They may also be trying to capture tablets, which are pushing above 1024 css px.

I just checked and the iPhone X has a height of 812px. It has a width of 375px. The regular iPad has a width of 768px, and the iPad Pro has a width of 1024px. So you could be right about them trying to capture all tablets, though a hamburger menu on the enormous iPad Pro sounds just as ridiculous as it does on a vertical monitor

Re: Just because I have a vertical screen doesn’t mean I’m on a phone

#255

Post by ryandrake »

jefftk wrote: post #147
sn_master wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't use HackerNews on my monitor without scaling. If I press Ctrl+0 on Chrome, the site becomes unusable.

HN has chosen to use very small fonts; I also leave it a bit zoomed in. Specifically, they have: .comment { font-size: 9pt; } .commhead { font-size: 8pt; } If I turn off all the site's font-size overrides, I no longer need to zoom in.

Personally, I'm not a fan of having a web site designer thousands of miles away from me just decide what font and text size I should be using to read their web site. Why not let the browser more easily control/override this? We already have PDF if your content truly needs pixel-perfect layout. Browsers have kind of dropped the ball. They're limiting user choice and slowly turning into desktop publishing platforms rather than being agents of the user.

Re: Just because I have a vertical screen doesn’t mean I’m on a phone

#256

Post by hinkley »

t-writescode wrote: post #229
g3e0 wrote: post #96

I feel like I must be missing something, because I don't understand this author's point at all. "Lots of websites think “Vertical Screen == Mobile User”!" No, they don't - They think a 720px wide screen is a tablet user, which is probably a fair assumption. I could equally write "Just because I browse zoomed in 500% doesn't mean I'm on a mobile" When you zoom in, things get bigger, so fewer of them will fit on the sc…

They don't even think that. I have one 1920x1080 monitor and one 1440p monitor. On both monitors, I regularly make it so that each screen is used by 2 applications. A lot of websites think 960x980 is mobile. *half* of a 1080p screen. It's bad and a huge assumption on their part that their website should only be seen in full-screen mode, or half of some 4k screen when the most popular resolution is ignored in a produc…

To expand on this, my work responsibilities often but don't exclusively involve monitoring logs or graphs, and usually I have one monitor dedicated to this. My goal is to encourage myself to look at it every time I remember to do so, and greasing the wheels means tiling windows so I don't have to touch anything. I'm peeking at them like my rear view mirrors.

If I haven't set up a vertical monitor, that's two browsers with half the screen (or 55% with some clever overlapping to clip margins). If I got around to rotating my display, that's could be a portrait window or still only 1100 pixels wide.

Re: Just because I have a vertical screen doesn’t mean I’m on a phone

#257

Post by silon42 »

prox wrote: post #178
iamben wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I still very often get "here is the desktop design, here is the mobile design". Depending on who is developing the designs depends how that's going to translate. I have all the time in the world for developers that reflow the page and remove/adjust elements at different breakpoints (based on the design) between 'desktop' and 'mobile' so the experience is good for everyone. Sadly, most people don't bother.

I believe true webdesigners are in decline. You have lots of people who do this as a side gig after reading a few tutorials. In a way that’s a nice compliment for the accessibility of the tech, but not accessibility for the end user. Same with “We only tested this on Chrome.” of sites/apps, of which are there are many, as I can attest, as I never use Chrome.

IMNSHO, more or less the case since they stopped using tables for layout.

Re: Just because I have a vertical screen doesn’t mean I’m on a phone

#258

Post by ansible »

andylynch wrote: post #220
AlchemistCamp wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've emailed one of YC's huge successes multiple times over years about how it's frustrating to have horizontal scrolling on a browser that's half of a 1080p display wide (i.e., nearly 1000px). Unfortunately, the horizontal scrolling UX with substantial wasted whitespace on the sides remains.

It could be worse. One particular web app I use daily has horizontal scroll bars even when full screen (and has some off the main info at far right).

Name and shame. That's the only way it gets better.

Re: Just because I have a vertical screen doesn’t mean I’m on a phone

#259

Post by ryandrake »

t-writescode wrote: post #232
matsemann wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lolno. I have to make Firefox take only half the screen, otherwise HN will render wiiide lines with text. I cannot read lines with >200 characters, then I miss the mark when jumping to the next line when it's multiple lines in a paragraph. HN is also the only site I have zoomed in on desktop, as the font is unreadably small on high dpi devices. And on mobile I find it impossible to hit the upvote arrow.

I prefer that way, way more than going to, for example, Github and doing a code review and the website refusing to give me more columns to look at in side-by-side view, because they think that the number of lines they've enabled is perfect and want to have the sides of the screen be full of whitespace that you have to modify the layout of the website to get rid of. Or random blog sites that become a narrow column of…

Browsers should have more say. In a perfect world, the web developer should not even need to know the browser's width or height, whether it's a phone or computer, or what kind of input devices are available. The developer should simply provide some kind of semantically tagged content (text and images), a list of suggested colors and fonts, and let the browser make the final call, based on what's best for the particular platform and screen size.

Somehow we've gotten to this world where the web designer expects almost-pixel-perfect control over the layout of every little thing on the page, user's preference be damned. You're not laying out a magazine page in a desktop publishing application!

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