I'd like to add 2 other sites to this list with horrible mobile interfaces that frequently show up on HN.
extremetech.com and geek.com
Extreme Tech's mobile site is totally unusable. They have a very crummy interface, instituted with javascript, that overrides the simple scrolling ability built into the browser and overlay it with a system that tries pseudo-pagination. If they would simply get rid of their attempt at a clever interface and just display their actual site, there wouldn't be a problem. If any Extreme Tech developers are reading this, please fix your mobile site.
The 2nd culprit, geek.com, crashes Mobile Safari. I'm on an iPhone 4. Because of whatever you are loading on your mobile site, it freezes the browser for upwards of a minute. Half the time the browser crashes before its done loading. Please, fix that too.
I actively avoid reading any of those sites, since I read HN from my phone about as often from a regular browser.
Another more generic complaint are to the people who use position:fixed on their sites to create headers and side navigation. Guess what, on mobile devices these don't scale. What ends up happening is that I need to zoom in to read your text, but then 3/4 of the screen is covered with your nav menu. Please, stop doing that.
Test your sites on mobile browsers. Its easy. Take the one in your pocket out and try your site. I'm not even advocating extensive dedicated testing. Just try it out like a normal user does and make sure it works most of the time. These are things that are so horrendously, obviously bad that I don't know how they ever got through any reasonable kind of QA.
Onswipe benefits no one. It makes the content unreadable, and doesn't add any value for anyone except themselves.
I don't read sites that use onswipe, in part because I want to boycott them, but mainly because I simply cannot get the UI to work. I suggest you avoid them too.
This kind of problems amazes me. It's year 2011, almost 2012 - we should have had flying cars and forcefield doors by now. Yet we are still struggling with getting a web page to work identically in different web browsers.
I am willing to bet that when we have flying cars and forcefield doors, there will still be problems of this kind in "information management", or whatever name you want to give to the problem that the web tries to solve.
Comments
I'd like to add 2 other sites to this list with horrible mobile interfaces that frequently show up on HN.
extremetech.com and geek.com
Extreme Tech's mobile site is totally unusable. They have a very crummy interface, instituted with javascript, that overrides the simple scrolling ability built into the browser and overlay it with a system that tries pseudo-pagination. If they would simply get rid of their attempt at a clever interface and just display their actual site, there wouldn't be a problem. If any Extreme Tech developers are reading this, please fix your mobile site.
The 2nd culprit, geek.com, crashes Mobile Safari. I'm on an iPhone 4. Because of whatever you are loading on your mobile site, it freezes the browser for upwards of a minute. Half the time the browser crashes before its done loading. Please, fix that too.
I actively avoid reading any of those sites, since I read HN from my phone about as often from a regular browser.
Another more generic complaint are to the people who use position:fixed on their sites to create headers and side navigation. Guess what, on mobile devices these don't scale. What ends up happening is that I need to zoom in to read your text, but then 3/4 of the screen is covered with your nav menu. Please, stop doing that.
Test your sites on mobile browsers. Its easy. Take the one in your pocket out and try your site. I'm not even advocating extensive dedicated testing. Just try it out like a normal user does and make sure it works most of the time. These are things that are so horrendously, obviously bad that I don't know how they ever got through any reasonable kind of QA.
Edited for excessive usage of caps. Sorry.
extremetech.com uses onswipe.
Onswipe sucks.
You can read people lamenting onswipe here http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2699610.
Onswipe benefits no one. It makes the content unreadable, and doesn't add any value for anyone except themselves.
I don't read sites that use onswipe, in part because I want to boycott them, but mainly because I simply cannot get the UI to work. I suggest you avoid them too.
position: fixed; is long as you use percents. Thing is position: fixed doesn't even work on iOS: https://gist.github.com/1196262
position: fixed was added in iOS 5. However, it becomes unstuck when pinch/zooming.
This kind of problems amazes me. It's year 2011, almost 2012 - we should have had flying cars and forcefield doors by now. Yet we are still struggling with getting a web page to work identically in different web browsers.
I am willing to bet that when we have flying cars and forcefield doors, there will still be problems of this kind in "information management", or whatever name you want to give to the problem that the web tries to solve.