6 ms·

Google to Hacker News: Not Mobile-Friendly

43 points by codewithcheese 11y ago

x0ra 11y ago
Even the HN app is pretty piss-poor... (and yeah, I'm not looking to get Y Combinator's funding)
fishnchips 11y ago
Time to apologise to the almighty G ;)
timthelion 11y ago
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 11y ago
  ^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?
  - jontro 11y ago
    Well, you only get worse SERP for mobile searches don't you? As long as google delivers good results people will use it, I am not that worried
  - golergka 11y ago
    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 11y ago
      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 11y ago
        Then Google sees that they don't use mobile devices when they search and your mobile unfriendliness doesn't affect search results.
  - tobyhinloopen 11y ago
    Google makes these kinds of decisions to improve their service: Finding the information you need. If you look up some information about bananas on your 4" touchscreen device and 2 sites provide info on them: A mobile site and a "regular" website, I want the mobile/responsive website, not the "regular" one.
- tobyhinloopen 11y ago
  They should not. A mobile browser should follow standards defined by people who thought about this kind of stuff. Mobile browsers render "desktop-designed" webpages this way because they should so according to the HTML/CSS/JS specs. As a developer, you should define which content should scale and/or resize according to browser viewport width and pixel density: Better known as "Responsive".
  - jay_kyburz 11y ago
    Agree wholeheartedly, nothing more annoying than a mobile browser thinking it knows better than the site designer. Mobile browser should render the page exactly how the designer specified.
- thameera 11y ago
  Isn't it the web designer's responsibility to provide enough metadata so that the browser can actually reflow the content without breaking the intended flow? Correctly reflowing a website doesn't sound like something a program could do without knowing enough context.
thomasahle 11y ago
Been annoyed by this for years. Still hoping for a fix some day.
nness 11y ago
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.
- golergka 11y ago
  Which always surprised me. I know very little about web design (just use bootstrap for prototypes sometimes), but the HN seems to be very minimalistic in design and features (that's what I like about it, actually). So it would seem that making it fit the viewport would be an easy task.
- aw3c2 11y ago
  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 11y ago
    What mobile browser do you use?
    - edent 11y ago
      I use Opera on Android. Reflow text is in the settings menu.
- MrSwagga 11y ago
  HN doesn't really use fixed dimensions. If you resize desktop browser window you see that is scales well. The width is set to 85%. I assume that most popular mobile web browsers render HN the same. This could mean that there are some standards for mobile devices that make it look as bad as it is. Unless you are someone who really wants to and can change the standard I assume that you start complying with it. :)
ExpiredLink 11y ago
>> There was a problem with the request. Please try again later.
preek 11y ago
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^_^
waxjar 11y ago
Luckily the community has built some very neat apps :)
sidcool 11y ago
We didn't need this test for HN, did we?
geekam 11y ago
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.
DanBC 11y ago
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.
JDiculous 11y ago
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 11y ago
  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 11y ago
    Maybe the S10 will have a 12" screen
    - jacquesm 11y ago
      It might, who knows. The compatibility onus is on the device manufacturers, not on the websites. That's the world upside down.
      - devsquid 11y ago
        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 11y ago
        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.
  - deleted 11y ago
jacquesm 11y ago
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.
- Sun2Sun 11y ago
  When I switch to "no style" in Firefox, HN becomes pretty responsive. The only 2 problems I can see are that the textarea on top still has a fixed width and that the comments are not indented. Mobile browsers should offer a custom style option, or at least a "no style" option like FF does. Sidenote: Is it possible at all to have horizontal scrolling websites that Google consideres mobile friendly? Some websites are intended to have a horizontal scroll. What are they supposed to do?
- mnem 11y ago
  It's not about being backwardly compatible (by and large most mobile browsers do a sterling job of that), it's about "friendly", which is to say, something which works fairly well with common mobile devices. HN has pretty tiny fonts and very small hit areas for fat human fingers. Mobile friendly isn't a meme, it's just a description of how well your chosen presentation of content translates into a different context of use. Context changes often require different choices about how you break up your content to throw at someone - this has been the case since the web began.
gcatalfamo 11y ago
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 11y ago
  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).
devsquid 11y ago
Wow what a great site to help sites work better for mobile.
skimmas 11y ago
Hacker news is actually one of the few sites that's kind of readable on my dumb phone.
andybak 11y ago
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.
tvvocold 11y ago
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=http%3A%2F%2Fnews.fdzh.org%2F https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/mobile-friendly/?url...
seba_dos1 11y ago
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?
jrs235 11y ago
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).
falcolas 11y ago
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.
orvr 11y ago
HN is one of friedliest mobile sites around. Small footprint, no javascript crap and loads fast.

x0ra 11y ago

Even the HN app is pretty piss-poor... (and yeah, I'm not looking to get Y Combinator's funding)

fishnchips 11y ago

Time to apologise to the almighty G ;)

timthelion 11y ago

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 11y ago
^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?
- jontro 11y ago
  Well, you only get worse SERP for mobile searches don't you? As long as google delivers good results people will use it, I am not that worried
- golergka 11y ago
  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 11y ago
    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 11y ago
      Then Google sees that they don't use mobile devices when they search and your mobile unfriendliness doesn't affect search results.
- tobyhinloopen 11y ago
  Google makes these kinds of decisions to improve their service: Finding the information you need. If you look up some information about bananas on your 4" touchscreen device and 2 sites provide info on them: A mobile site and a "regular" website, I want the mobile/responsive website, not the "regular" one.
tobyhinloopen 11y ago
They should not. A mobile browser should follow standards defined by people who thought about this kind of stuff. Mobile browsers render "desktop-designed" webpages this way because they should so according to the HTML/CSS/JS specs. As a developer, you should define which content should scale and/or resize according to browser viewport width and pixel density: Better known as "Responsive".
- jay_kyburz 11y ago
  Agree wholeheartedly, nothing more annoying than a mobile browser thinking it knows better than the site designer. Mobile browser should render the page exactly how the designer specified.
thameera 11y ago
Isn't it the web designer's responsibility to provide enough metadata so that the browser can actually reflow the content without breaking the intended flow? Correctly reflowing a website doesn't sound like something a program could do without knowing enough context.

thomasahle 11y ago

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

nness 11y ago

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.

golergka 11y ago
Which always surprised me. I know very little about web design (just use bootstrap for prototypes sometimes), but the HN seems to be very minimalistic in design and features (that's what I like about it, actually). So it would seem that making it fit the viewport would be an easy task.
aw3c2 11y ago
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 11y ago
  What mobile browser do you use?
  - edent 11y ago
    I use Opera on Android. Reflow text is in the settings menu.
MrSwagga 11y ago
HN doesn't really use fixed dimensions. If you resize desktop browser window you see that is scales well. The width is set to 85%. I assume that most popular mobile web browsers render HN the same. This could mean that there are some standards for mobile devices that make it look as bad as it is. Unless you are someone who really wants to and can change the standard I assume that you start complying with it. :)

ExpiredLink 11y ago

>> There was a problem with the request. Please try again later.

preek 11y ago

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^_^

waxjar 11y ago

Luckily the community has built some very neat apps :)

sidcool 11y ago

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

geekam 11y ago

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.

DanBC 11y ago

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.

JDiculous 11y ago

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 11y ago
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 11y ago
  Maybe the S10 will have a 12" screen
  - jacquesm 11y ago
    It might, who knows. The compatibility onus is on the device manufacturers, not on the websites. That's the world upside down.
    - devsquid 11y ago
      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 11y ago
        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.
- deleted 11y ago

jacquesm 11y ago

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.

Sun2Sun 11y ago
When I switch to "no style" in Firefox, HN becomes pretty responsive. The only 2 problems I can see are that the textarea on top still has a fixed width and that the comments are not indented. Mobile browsers should offer a custom style option, or at least a "no style" option like FF does. Sidenote: Is it possible at all to have horizontal scrolling websites that Google consideres mobile friendly? Some websites are intended to have a horizontal scroll. What are they supposed to do?
mnem 11y ago
It's not about being backwardly compatible (by and large most mobile browsers do a sterling job of that), it's about "friendly", which is to say, something which works fairly well with common mobile devices. HN has pretty tiny fonts and very small hit areas for fat human fingers. Mobile friendly isn't a meme, it's just a description of how well your chosen presentation of content translates into a different context of use. Context changes often require different choices about how you break up your content to throw at someone - this has been the case since the web began.

gcatalfamo 11y ago

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 11y ago
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).

devsquid 11y ago

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

skimmas 11y ago

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

andybak 11y ago

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.

tvvocold 11y ago

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

seba_dos1 11y ago

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?

jrs235 11y ago

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).

falcolas 11y ago

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.

orvr 11y ago

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