alt Hacker NewsSometimes who can't be bothered to make the text on their website not extremely tiny when viewing on mobile shouldn't be writing multi-page rants on the other people's UI.
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Isn’t he just serving up the desktop website? This goes along with the original intent of the benefits of the browser on the iPhone. It was able to run the normal Internet, not a separate “mobile” version of it. I found a simple double tap on the text sized it perfectly fine to read the text.
What I find to be a UI problem are sites that force me into a mobile view, which often loses features, and which removes my ability to zoom and pan as I wish. Apple had to add an option to “Request Desktop Website”, which I assume spoofs the user agent, to try and get around this issue. But for site that use other means, this still doesn’t work and the user is locked into a crippled mobile page… the exact problem modern smartphones were supposed to solve.
I’ll take Gruber’s model every time over the crippled mobile sandbox with no way out.
Just double tap the text you want to zoom to, as has been the way for nearly 20 years.
Thank god for Reader Mode.
Even on desktop the site is quite difficult to read. White on gray isn't a great reading experience regardless of font size.
Accessibility technology like reader mode is once again proving its worth.
I've been using firefox's viewport zoom to improve website visibility a lot these days. Traditional zoom reflows the page, but the viewport zoom keeps the page the same, just makes it bigger. You might know this from pinching out on the touchpad on a laptop, but you can do this on a keyboard by setting `mousewheel.with_$KEY.action` to 5 to perform viewport zoom by having a keyboard key pressed. I use it with alt, and use AHK to bind XB2+scroll to emit alts instead (I make it emit ctrl regularly but alt when a firefox window is focused). It has been one of my best usability improvements recently. It's one of those things that, if you make ergonomic enough, you end up using on every single website, since you can make the column width the optimal size for your readability.
I dont think you are really bothered by it either given you are discussing this on a website which has exactly the same behavior :)