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Ask HN: Why is HN not mobile friendly yet?

news.ycombinator.com

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

#11

Post by dredmorbius »

bartwe wrote: post #2

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

My biggest gripe on mobile is that the controls are too small and too closely placed. Site itself is reasonably readable (could be better). But odds of upvotng, downvoting, or opening the author's user profile page are pretty much a crapshoot.

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

#14

Post by DanBC »

Anytime they try to make changes there are hundreds of complaints about those changes.

Many people on mobile only want a bit more separation between the vote buttons. That would make accidental downvotes harder, and would encourage upvoting.

Personally, I'd like text that was a bit larger and text that reflowed, but I know other people might hate that.

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

#15

Post by lmorris84 »

bartwe wrote: post #2

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

Agreed. It's laid out in such a simple way it's easy to navigate and read.

I can fit 25 posts on the screen on iPhone 6 which is nice for browsing - ihackernews makes everything bigger and drops me down to 4/5.

Keep it the way it is if we're voting on it ;-)

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

#16

Post by teekert »

I use http://cheeaun.github.io/hackerweb/

Some time ago Hackernews was mobile ready for a short time, there were a lot of complaints (I can't find the thread at the moment). I guess the HN philosophy is to keep it as basic and simple as possible and leave the rest to 3rd parties.

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

#17

Post by cft »

alpb wrote: 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.

Two suggestions: infinite scroll down to get more stories, pull down to refresh the feed.

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

#18

Post by raquo »

MichaelGG wrote: post #10

The change should be done in the browser. It's just dumb that we don't have reflow in Firefox mobile. Chrome seems to do it fine (but lack of adblock makes it my non default browser). News.yc is a simple, easy site. Browsers should just work on it.

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

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

#19

Post by d--b »

Maybe, YC is trying to teach you something about product building. Something like: "we don't make our site mobile friendly because the content is so good that people still use it on their phone even if they have to zoom in a little. The day when people stop coming to hacker news or apply to YC because it's not mobile friendly, then we might do something about it. Otherwise it's just a waste of time and money for us." In other words: don't rush into building everything people ask you to do, they might not really need it.

It's probably not what they intend to do... But still worth thinking about ;)

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