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Upvoting you is not enough - let's focus on the local problem. Dang - have you seen HN in Firefox on Android recently? Is there something we can do to improve

Upvoting you is not enough - let's focus on the local problem. Dang - have you seen HN in Firefox on Android recently? Is there something we can do to improve this? Given that HN receives a moderate amount of (visible) changes recently, is there a way to make the site work in that situation/setup?

msl09 11y ago
What's wrong?
- darklajid 11y ago
  http://m.imgur.com/On83n3W http://m.imgur.com/On83n3W The indentation for one. Notice that the second comment is an answer to the first, but is on the same level of indentation. Following discussions like that is highly annoying. Weird: While grabbing the phone to answer your question I noticed that "threads", i.e. the view of my comments, works fine. Just the comments below submission links are broken. Compare to Chrome: http://m.imgur.com/Wpusprq http://m.imgur.com/Wpusprq Note that I do use uBlock in Firefox. Now that I think about it, that might be relevant as well. But then again, why would that break the submission view and not the "threads" link?
  - pmontra 11y ago
    I get that Chrome like rendering in every browser on my tablet (1) and with Opera and the stock browser on the phone. I reinstalled Firefox on the browser and it looks like your one. I understand that it makes difficult to follow threads but at least we can see deeply nested comments: they don't collapse to a single column of letters. (1) Lines are not terminated at the screen boundary on the tablet if I zoom in. They keep going off screen to the right. Same on the stock browser on the phone and with Opera if I turn off text reflow.
rubberstamp 11y ago
whatever you do, please keep everything else as it is now. HN loads very fast as it doesn't load every library on the planet. Do fix the rendering problem on firefox if possible, and keep it lightweight as it is now
- pbhjpbhj 11y ago
  If you took out all the table markup you'd probably save about half the page code. Using divs and css doesn't require any onpage libraries and would allow [HN] users to easily fix things like this with a user.css file with a left border on nested comments (for example) if the site didn't want to have a sane style for some reason [established parsing tools maybe].
pmontra 11y ago
I already commented about this issue at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10879874 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10879874 To elaborate it further, the problem common to every browser I tried (the only one missing is Safari) is that comments are nested and if I zoom the page to be actually able to read the text, I have to pain points now: 1) I have to keep scrolling right and left to keep them in view as I scroll vertically to follow the threads. 2) Even if 1 were not bad enough, the comments are too wide now to fit into the screen (remember that I zoomed in) and I have to horizontally scroll at each line. The only browser not to suffer from that is Opera which reflows text after a zoom (if you enable that option). I'm left with problem 1 but it's the least painful. I suspect that a div layout would fare better, still there are tons of blogs with div layouts that end up with 10px wide comments at deep nesting levels. Maybe some media queries to remove nesting for devices not wide enough and adapt the page width after a zoom? I don't even know if the latter is possible. Edit: I checked on the desktop and it seems that you already reduce nesting when the screen width is reduced, to the point of removing it at all. I wonder why my tablet and my browser are not affected and keep displaying the indentation to the left. Any browser, any user agent (desktop or mobile). They're 1600x2560px and 480x800px.
dwightgunning 11y ago
It would be neat if the HN frontend was open-source and the community could submit PRs for improvements.
skarap 11y ago
Well I've sent a bug report to hn@ycombinator.com back in November. They said "It's a bad bug and we're going to fix it". So I'm waiting.

msl09 11y ago

What's wrong?

darklajid 11y ago
http://m.imgur.com/On83n3W http://m.imgur.com/On83n3W The indentation for one. Notice that the second comment is an answer to the first, but is on the same level of indentation. Following discussions like that is highly annoying. Weird: While grabbing the phone to answer your question I noticed that "threads", i.e. the view of my comments, works fine. Just the comments below submission links are broken. Compare to Chrome: http://m.imgur.com/Wpusprq http://m.imgur.com/Wpusprq Note that I do use uBlock in Firefox. Now that I think about it, that might be relevant as well. But then again, why would that break the submission view and not the "threads" link?
- pmontra 11y ago
  I get that Chrome like rendering in every browser on my tablet (1) and with Opera and the stock browser on the phone. I reinstalled Firefox on the browser and it looks like your one. I understand that it makes difficult to follow threads but at least we can see deeply nested comments: they don't collapse to a single column of letters. (1) Lines are not terminated at the screen boundary on the tablet if I zoom in. They keep going off screen to the right. Same on the stock browser on the phone and with Opera if I turn off text reflow.

rubberstamp 11y ago

whatever you do, please keep everything else as it is now. HN loads very fast as it doesn't load every library on the planet. Do fix the rendering problem on firefox if possible, and keep it lightweight as it is now

pbhjpbhj 11y ago
If you took out all the table markup you'd probably save about half the page code. Using divs and css doesn't require any onpage libraries and would allow [HN] users to easily fix things like this with a user.css file with a left border on nested comments (for example) if the site didn't want to have a sane style for some reason [established parsing tools maybe].

pmontra 11y ago

I already commented about this issue at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10879874 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10879874 To elaborate it further, the problem common to every browser I tried (the only one missing is Safari) is that comments are nested and if I zoom the page to be actually able to read the text, I have to pain points now: 1) I have to keep scrolling right and left to keep them in view as I scroll vertically to follow the threads. 2) Even if 1 were not bad enough, the comments are too wide now to fit into the screen (remember that I zoomed in) and I have to horizontally scroll at each line. The only browser not to suffer from that is Opera which reflows text after a zoom (if you enable that option). I'm left with problem 1 but it's the least painful. I suspect that a div layout would fare better, still there are tons of blogs with div layouts that end up with 10px wide comments at deep nesting levels. Maybe some media queries to remove nesting for devices not wide enough and adapt the page width after a zoom? I don't even know if the latter is possible. Edit: I checked on the desktop and it seems that you already reduce nesting when the screen width is reduced, to the point of removing it at all. I wonder why my tablet and my browser are not affected and keep displaying the indentation to the left. Any browser, any user agent (desktop or mobile). They're 1600x2560px and 480x800px.

dwightgunning 11y ago

It would be neat if the HN frontend was open-source and the community could submit PRs for improvements.

skarap 11y ago

Well I've sent a bug report to hn@ycombinator.com back in November. They said "It's a bad bug and we're going to fix it". So I'm waiting.