The Mobile Web should just work for everyone • Hacker News Board

Re: The Mobile Web should just work for everyone

#81

Post by mbrameld » Mon, Aug 04, 2014, 5:51 PM UTC

elinchrome wrote: post #55

rayiner wrote: post #53

The mobile web is just a disaster all around. I remember when I got my iPhone in '08, the browsing experience was amazing. Most sites were still relatively simple, and whatever highly non-standard tricks Safari played to do things like text reflow worked great on that small 3.5" screen. Half a decade later, I'm profusely disappointed with Chrome's browsing experience on my Nexus 5's massive 5" screen. Even on HN, I c…

For reddit you should use the .compact url. E.g. reddit.com/.compact.

You can also use i.reddit.com to get the same effect.

Re: The Mobile Web should just work for everyone

#82

Post by markuskobler » Mon, Aug 04, 2014, 5:51 PM UTC

untog wrote: post #73

I think the Windows Phone team deserve some credit for doing this, knowing that the developer reaction to it will be deeply negative (read: most comments in this thread). The simple fact is that it works better for Windows Phone users. If developers hadn't been using webkit-prefixed CSS everywhere it wouldn't be an issue, but it is. That said , I wish Windows Phone IE had better developer tools. Both Android and iOS…

I agree. The first release of IE had a user-agent starting with Mozilla and its something all major browsers (Chrome, Safari, IE, Firefox) still prefix their user-agents with.

  Mozilla/1.22 (compatible; MSIE 2.0; Windows 3.1)

Still none of that detracts from how broken relying on user-agent to improve user experience is. Browsers like Chrome seem to handle features like webp support better with the Accept: image/webp header but even that has its limitations if you care about animated webp or not say.

Re: The Mobile Web should just work for everyone

#83

Post by fidotron » Mon, Aug 04, 2014, 5:55 PM UTC

untog wrote: post #73

I think the Windows Phone team deserve some credit for doing this, knowing that the developer reaction to it will be deeply negative (read: most comments in this thread). The simple fact is that it works better for Windows Phone users. If developers hadn't been using webkit-prefixed CSS everywhere it wouldn't be an issue, but it is. That said , I wish Windows Phone IE had better developer tools. Both Android and iOS…

This is also symptomatic of the way Windows clients have fallen out of favour with many devs generally. Android people have enough trouble persuading them (and designers) that the world isn't just Apple, but having a toolchain that requires Windows desktop? Instant not-going-to-happen.

Re: The Mobile Web should just work for everyone

#84

Post by repsilat » Mon, Aug 04, 2014, 5:55 PM UTC

riskable wrote: post #80

This is just another reason why all browsers (not just mobile) should be reporting their screen size. As in, the actual height/width. Not pixels. Pixels lie and so do browsers, actually. If I knew that the user's browser was 3 inches wide I could choose a point-based font size that's appropriate. It would also be trivially easy to scale font and image sizes up or down based on that knowledge. Especially if I'm using…

> As in, the actual height/width. Not pixels.

What does the browser in an Oculus Rift report? What about the projector on my wall?

Perhaps we're more interested in angular sizes, and then possibly pixel densities (again in terms of angular size) in case we need to worry about font legibility etc.

Re: The Mobile Web should just work for everyone

#85

Post by jmulho » Mon, Aug 04, 2014, 5:58 PM UTC

rayiner wrote: post #53

The mobile web is just a disaster all around. I remember when I got my iPhone in '08, the browsing experience was amazing. Most sites were still relatively simple, and whatever highly non-standard tricks Safari played to do things like text reflow worked great on that small 3.5" screen. Half a decade later, I'm profusely disappointed with Chrome's browsing experience on my Nexus 5's massive 5" screen. Even on HN, I c…

When I first experienced browsing with mobile devices the stand out feature was zoom. Double-tap on a column of text and it would zoom to fill the width of the screen. This (and similar navigation features such as swipe to scroll) made mobile browsing preferable to desktop browsing for me, despite the smaller screen. Fast forward a few years. Almost every website has a mobile version. Three quarters of these mobile sites (it seems) disable the devices native zoom. This makes zero sense. The device with the three inch screen is the one that needs zoom. It’s like the authors of mobile libraries are all twelve years old, can hear mosquito ringtones, and read microscopic text while bouncing up and down in the back of a car. Well, here is some news. People over thirty can’t read your website. The first thing we do when we get to your site is scroll to the bottom for the link that says desktop version.

Re: The Mobile Web should just work for everyone

#86

Post by sp332 » Mon, Aug 04, 2014, 6:03 PM UTC

mikelat wrote: post #51

ntakasaki wrote: post #14

Edit: The previous title was "Windows Phone's IE starts masquerading as mobile Safari to render pages properly" Looks like the webkit prefix tags are creating the new IE6. As usual, it's the web developers fault for not updating their CSS prefixes. http://css.dzone.com/articles/why-webkit-new-ie6-trap-vendor Mozilla, Opera and Microsoft have been complaining about this and Opera had already implemented support for th…

> Looks like the webkit prefix tags are creating the new IE6. This bothers me. Webkit isn't some ancient browser that is has remained stagnant for years until google/apple decided to do something about it. Nobody spends hours debugging their perfect layouts in webkit. Webkit isn't holding the entire web back. It's just a poor comparison. I browse mobile web in mostly firefox mobile, and I don't think I've ever seen a…

No, the new IE6 :) like back when IE6 was king. Meaning that web developers make their site work only in webkit and screw the rest of us.

Re: The Mobile Web should just work for everyone

#87

Post by untog » Mon, Aug 04, 2014, 6:06 PM UTC

fidotron wrote: post #83

untog wrote: post #73

I think the Windows Phone team deserve some credit for doing this, knowing that the developer reaction to it will be deeply negative (read: most comments in this thread). The simple fact is that it works better for Windows Phone users. If developers hadn't been using webkit-prefixed CSS everywhere it wouldn't be an issue, but it is. That said , I wish Windows Phone IE had better developer tools. Both Android and iOS…

This is also symptomatic of the way Windows clients have fallen out of favour with many devs generally. Android people have enough trouble persuading them (and designers) that the world isn't just Apple, but having a toolchain that requires Windows desktop? Instant not-going-to-happen.

Yes. It feels philosophically unfair to complain about, but I want a Windows Phone emulator for OS X. Of course, Windows users don't get an emulator for iOS either, but Apple has popularity on their side.

Re: The Mobile Web should just work for everyone

#88

Post by Joeri » Mon, Aug 04, 2014, 6:11 PM UTC

rayiner wrote: post #53

The mobile web is just a disaster all around. I remember when I got my iPhone in '08, the browsing experience was amazing. Most sites were still relatively simple, and whatever highly non-standard tricks Safari played to do things like text reflow worked great on that small 3.5" screen. Half a decade later, I'm profusely disappointed with Chrome's browsing experience on my Nexus 5's massive 5" screen. Even on HN, I c…

Mostly its the fault of us web developers. We started building mobile-optimized sites, and that messed everything up. Now every mobile-"friendly" site has bloated retina graphics and uses very specific and carefully developed layout mechanisms that abandon zooming, fluid layouts and graceful degradation, because, you know, it's mobile, so that stuff doesn't make sense there. If we'd all just done nothing, the mobile web would be in a lot better state than it is.

(My personal pet peeve is onswipe, the most horrible mobile experience ever imagined, always worse than the desktop site on the same device, and yet ubiquitous.)

Re: The Mobile Web should just work for everyone

#89

Post by ProAm » Mon, Aug 04, 2014, 6:12 PM UTC

squeaky-clean wrote: post #65

rayiner wrote: post #53

The mobile web is just a disaster all around. I remember when I got my iPhone in '08, the browsing experience was amazing. Most sites were still relatively simple, and whatever highly non-standard tricks Safari played to do things like text reflow worked great on that small 3.5" screen. Half a decade later, I'm profusely disappointed with Chrome's browsing experience on my Nexus 5's massive 5" screen. Even on HN, I c…

I'd recommend ihackernews.com for browsing HN on mobile (not my website). I use it daily, and it's much better than the completely non-responsive HN site. I'd like to join you on this mobile rant for a bit. Mobile browsing completely sucks right now. Whether it's websites that don't know how (or don't bother) to design with mobile in mind, or websites that do try to design with mobile in mind, and go completely over…

I second using ihackernews.com on mobile. It's got the UI nailed for this site.

Re: The Mobile Web should just work for everyone

#90

Post by ChikkaChiChi » Mon, Aug 04, 2014, 6:14 PM UTC

Why doesn't Microsoft just adopt or fork WebKit?

The world doesn't need Trident. The case for IE being mandatory in the OS died years ago, and the new direction Microsoft talks about taking embraces open source.

A Microsoft backed browser that ran WebKit (or even Gecko) would give their team a much stronger platform to stand on when discussing standards. It would also close the door on one of Microsoft's biggest black eyes; the stagnation of the web in the early 2000's because of IE.