
Google to Hacker News: Not Mobile-Friendly - codewithcheese
https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/mobile-friendly/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fnews.ycombinator.com%2F
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jacquesm
The whole 'not mobile friendly' meme really needs to die. The sites are never
at fault, a mobile browser is entirely capable of rendering sites however they
see fit and to ignore or incorporate any or all elements of the style sheets
and mark-up that a site supplies.

The pixel-perfect coupling that people expect between what a site should look
like according to the designers and how that site is rendered by the browsers
is an illusion, that's not the way the web was supposed to work at all, web
sites provide information and loose markup hints and browsers then render that
information in the best way suitable for the device and its user.

Don't blame the website, blame the browser instead.

Ironically, looking at ancient (pre-CSS, pre table based layouts) websites
through modern browsers gives you instant adaptive design because all there
was was content, no eye candy.

If we had wanted pixel based rendering we could have done a damn sight better
than CSS, style sheets and markup are hints, not ultimatums to be obeyed or
failure will occur.

Just think about the burden that these demands make on older websites,
websites that worked perfectly well in the past suddenly need to be modified
in order to be displayed properly, that's a total inversion of the way things
are supposed to work. Old content and older websites should be displayed with
as high fidelity as possible on newer browsers and devices. You can't fault
the makers of old websites for not being 'future compatible' but you _can_
fault the makers of new devices and browsers for not being compatible with the
past.

~~~
vacri
The up/downvote buttons on HN are an example of 'not mobile friendly'. They
work fine with a pointer, but not with a touchscreen - you often see someone
apologise for downmodding when they meant to upmod, because of this problem.

Pointer-driven UI and touchscreen UI have different local maxima. One of the
reasons Ubuntu's Unity looks like it does is because they intend for it to
look and work well on both UI types.

~~~
riffraff
FWIW, opera (on iOS at least) did this right years ago, when I hit the area it
just zooms in and highlights both clickable areas, so I can effectively click
on the up or down arrow.

(OTOH, the up/down buttons on HN are not desktop friendly either)

~~~
thomasahle
Sure, this still happens. That doesn't change that the experience is less nice
than if the website had been designed with mobile in mind. Or if it had been
and app.

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DanBC
If anyone from Google is reading: text entry boxes on Chrome on iOS are
suboptimal.

[http://imgur.com/XpygcTq](http://imgur.com/XpygcTq)

[http://imgur.com/cAjceFY](http://imgur.com/cAjceFY)

The address bar takes up a lot of vertical space that could be better used to
show more lines of text. That big block of empty white space on the previous
item next item close menu bar is also wasted.

If Google really wants to fix browsing on mobile they might want to look at
their own products as well as using their seo powers.

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nness
I didn't think that was ever in doubt, was it? HN has always been difficult to
use on mobile devices due to all the fixed dimensions forcing the page to
render at an unsuitable size.

~~~
aw3c2
Apart from accidental downvoting I never had any problems with it. Get a
browser that nicely reflows and that locks horizontal scrolling nicely (not
too much, not too little) and it's a breeze to read and participate. I love
that I can choose the font-size and zoom level myself,
notblindthankyouverymuch.

~~~
thameera
What mobile browser do you use?

~~~
edent
I use Opera on Android. Reflow text is in the settings menu.

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timthelion
This is a great example of why mobile browsers suck. It is the job of the
mobile browser to be able to fix these problems automatically, to resize and
reflow text so that it displays properly on the device.

~~~
moepstar
^this.

And: It pisses me off to no end that Google is in the position to decide how a
site has to look like on $device.

They announce that you will get a worse SERP if your site doesn't do X and
everyone scrambles to please mighty G.

If they decide that every site has to have a yellow background, starting next
week, what will you do? Give in?

~~~
golergka
The whole business model of Google is knowledge about what users want to see
on the web. And their judgements about it are context-specific: they are true
for the current situation, when the mobile browsers work as they do. If Google
is wrong, and users want the sites that are _not_ optimized for mobile, they
will lose their market share.

However, if they are right, and the users _do_ want to see sites optimised for
mobile, it means that while you are right technically about how mobile
browsers are supposed to work, and how sites are supposed to work, the real
users just don't agree with you.

~~~
seba_dos1
What if my target audience is actually that 1% niche that doesn't care about
mobile, or a niche that actually uses decent browsers and mobile platforms, so
they're perfectly able to view my simple page even without stupid meta
viewport tag?

It seems easy to just add the tag and a few CSS rules - but what if this is a
still useful page from 2005 which I have forgotten about?

~~~
golergka
Then Google sees that they don't use mobile devices when they search and your
mobile unfriendliness doesn't affect search results.

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JDiculous
It still blows my mind that the text on the HN homepage is unreadably too
small on my Samsung Galaxy S4. Surely you guys have enough money and/or
technical chops to fix that?

~~~
jacquesm
The Galaxy S4 came out _well_ after HN was built, why should the burden be on
HN, why don't you say 'Surely Samsung would have the money and/or technical
chops to make a product compatible with the web as existed prior to when the
device was launched?'.

edit: hello downvoters, would you be equally upset that a windows 95 machine
would refuse to run office 2000?

~~~
jamespo
Maybe the S10 will have a 12" screen

~~~
jacquesm
It might, who knows. The compatibility onus is on the device manufacturers,
not on the websites. That's the world upside down.

~~~
devsquid
How does that make sense?

The device's web browser should attempt to adapt the page to fit the device
rather than the site telling the browser how it should adapt to the size of
the screen.

~~~
jacquesm
Either I don't understand you or we're in agreement. Yes, the device's web
browser should do the adaptation, sites can tell browsers whatever they want
and browsers are totally free to ignore that information, after all the
browser and the device have more information to work with.

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andybak
To everyone saying "browsers should fix this - not site owners"

How many possible ways is there for a site to make itself hard to read on a
small screen?

How many rules would a mobile browser need to have to handle them all?

How smart would these rules need to be to distinguish between intentional and
unintentional design decisions?

It's beyond question that websites should be coded in such a way that they
works on a range of devices screen sizes. Anything else is madness.

------
preek
There's great mobile choices like:
[http://cheeaun.github.io/hackerweb/](http://cheeaun.github.io/hackerweb/)

Two bookmarks for different browsers, no big trouble. I actually like the old
school table based layout of HN. One of the things that stay the same. And it
works great with Vimium^_^

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thomasahle
Been annoyed by this for years. Still hoping for a fix some day.

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gcatalfamo
I see 3 schools of thought: 1) HN should be more mobile-friendly, so I can
read it. 2) HN should be more of a platform on top of which users can build
tools to use it, so let's build one. 3) Why not both?

I think both iOS and Android have already a plethora of user-made apps. (some
of them ok, some of them not ok)

On a tablet i prefer the HN website to any of the apps currently available. On
a phone, I think there are a few good Android apps and no good enough iOS
apps...

What is the best HN experience on mobile? I think there's need for better
understanding of what we "want" from mobile, apart from the obvious things
(i.e. readability)

~~~
thameera
I'm yet to come across a good iOS app for HN that is both visually pleasing
and is not just a reader (i.e. lets me submit/post comments).

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jrs235
The biggest winners of this change are the SEO companies that charge small
businesses lots of money who will now charge them lots of money to make sure
their website is mobile friendly (even if it already is).

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tvvocold
Interesting, here is my HK clone site(Most of code r same as HK) and it's
Mobile-Friendly according to Google[1].I think they can change come code for
Mobile.

[1] [http://news.fdzh.org/](http://news.fdzh.org/)

[2] [https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/mobile-
friendly/?url...](https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/mobile-
friendly/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fnews.fdzh.org%2F)

------
seba_dos1
This site is considered by Google as not mobile friendly:
[http://dosowisko.net/](http://dosowisko.net/)

Just bunch of easily reflowed text and a bit of ASCII art. Browser on my Nokia
N900 shows it just fine, zooming is usable, everything seems "friendly". If
Nokia could do it on Maemo long time ago, why Apple and Google can't do it
now?

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sidcool
We didn't need this test for HN, did we?

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falcolas
I'd like to take this moment to point out that a few weeks ago, HN did try for
a mobile friendly styling, and the HN population at large rose enough of a
fuss about "it looked fine as it was before" that they reverted it back.

We can't have it both ways.

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geekam
I think one thing that will greatly help mobile experience for me is to add a
reddit-style collapse comment section toggler. On mobile devices (and in some
cases on desktops), it will help reach the lower comments easily without
having to scroll a lot.

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orvr
HN is one of friedliest mobile sites around. Small footprint, no javascript
crap and loads fast.

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skimmas
Hacker news is actually one of the few sites that's kind of readable on my
dumb phone.

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devsquid
Wow what a great site to help sites work better for mobile.

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waxjar
Luckily the community has built some very neat apps :)

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fishnchips
Time to apologise to the almighty G ;)

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