Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

shkspr.mobi

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

261–270 of 399 posts

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

#261

Post by ryandrake »

invalidtaxonomy wrote: post #253

Some sites go as far as to assume that I’m on mobile because my user agent says ARM. I’m getting a mostly blank page on amazon unless I’m changing arm to x86_64 in my user agent string, then it magically becomes usable.

That's both sad and hilarious! It reminds me of the rumor[1] that Microsoft had to go from Windows 8 to Windows 10, skipping 9, because too many clueless developers were grepping the version string for "Windows 9" in a flawed attempt to detect the Windows 95 and Windows 98 operating systems.

1: https://www.pcworld.com/article/2690724/why-windows-10-isnt-...

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

#262

Post by awillen »

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

Hah, look at this guy - "lots of people prefer", he says, before saying he'd love to see hard data. Feel free to go find some hard data, then. I've dealt with a lot of people with computers in my personal life and my career, and well under 1% of them have had this setup. I'm not going to go find data to prove something obvious to a guy on the internet. It's like a Trump support insisting there's fraud and then telling everyone else to prove there isn't.

Eye roll all you want, but I have dealt with so many customers like this as an enterprise software PM. Usually it was with Salesforce configurations... my favorite was the guy who had a truly bizarre custom Salesforce setup that had two copies of every user. I was managing a product that synced their data from Salesforce to our product. It was a problem for his users of our product that there were duplicate copies of every user, and he wanted us to fix that. No sir - when we were selling this to you we explained that we sync all users... just because you assumed we'd somehow magically dedupe yours in your insane setup doesn't make that reality.

You're free to configure the products you use in unique and interesting ways. Just don't expect other people who develop tools for those products to make them work for your configuration.

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

#263

Post by bcrosby95 »

jefftk wrote: post #48

Sites are not detecting a portrait screen and deciding that they're displaying on a phone. Someone who switches their monitor to portrait, or resizes a window to be taller than it is wide, is still going to get the desktop view. In this case the author is scaling their resolution, and so their browser is presenting itself to sites as 720px wide. Sites see that and show a layout optimized for a screen of that width. T…

You're missing the forest for the trees here. Sites are using pixels as a proxy for physical device size. Which obviously breaks. I doubt people actually intend to display mobile view on a 720px, 12" wide device.

They're only working correctly if you ignore the intent and only look at the technical implementation. The technical implementation is flawed and doesn't accomplish the intent.

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

#264

Post by int_19h »

ryandrake wrote: post #255
jefftk wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 rat…

Most browsers have a "minimum font size" setting, which would be applicable here.

In general, CSS already provides a bunch of generic font families and sizes. So a page could style something as e.g. "sans-serif" and "large" - and then the browser should figure out what this actually means according to user settings. The problem is that very few sites actually use these. But for those that do, the browsers do the right thing - and, again, most of them let you configure what the generic font families map to.

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

#265

Post by pmalynin »

ansible wrote: post #258
andylynch wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sounds like the Azure Dashboard, but I haven’t used it in years

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

#267

Post by aembleton »

jessriedel wrote: post #250
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…

Why don't browsers tell the server whether the user has a touch screen? This seems like a perfectly reasonable thing that the website should know before delivering the page, and users who are hyper privacy focused could toggle a setting to not send this info.

A touch screen has @media (pointer: coarse)

CSS can be used to style elements accordingly: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/@media/poin...

No need to get the server involved.

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

#268

Post by jeroenhd »

> I have tried “Fractional Scaling” – it works OK on Wayland, but leaves all the fonts looking soft and fuzzy.

Ah, there we go. The real, underlying problem is that the scaling that would make this problem go away doesn't work for you.

Scaling the fonts instead of fixing the underlying issue and then deciding that all of web development is wrong for optimising for CSS pixel count (like one should) instead of manually doing DPI calculations (which everyone gets wrong, very often, and probably Javascript just to do a basic layout) is a silly solution.

Look for a blurry-font-rendering solution instead of a change-the-way-everyone-develops-websites solution, it's a lot easier to convince people that it's a real problem.

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

#269

Post by peheje »

ryandrake wrote: post #255
jefftk wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 rat…

Both Chrome and Safari has accessibility features to set a minimum font size in their settings page. I can't see how it could be easier.

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

#270

Post by karpierz »

jefftk wrote: post #247
badsectoracula wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Uh, i wrote "viewport width is not the same as the monitor width", this is the same as what you wrote. As for why it is wrong, it is because you can't rely on it to make a Mobile vs Desktop distinction - i already provided an example why.

"Mobile vs desktop" is not a distinction websites should be making. Sites should make the best use they can of the available horizontal space. It's still not clear to me where you think this approach gives bad results?

Ergonomics of using touch screen vs. mouse.

Usage while walking/moving vs. sitting/standing at a desk.

Post reply on HN