No, you're not alone. I almost always choose desktop mode where available, primarily because mobile sites disable zoom and choose settings for margins and font sizes that make their text almost unreadably large - frequently only two or three words per line, with masses of whitespace all around.
Reading such articles feels claustrophobic, because you're stuck in this long tunnel of text, with little visual indicator of how long it lasts, inducing anxiety about wasted time. If you're somewhere in the middle, it's a long trip back up to the top.
The close to optimal mobile browser for me was the original (AOSP) Android browser around 2.3. It rewrapped text on double-tap to fit in the visible page area, meaning you could choose what effective font size worked well for you. And zoom still worked, so you had a good handle on where you were on the page, and an easy way out of it.
Neither Firefox nor Chrome on Android are as good a browser for me. Unfortunately, getting the AOSP browser back is awkward, unless you want to use Dolphin or similar, and besides, it no longer has the rewrap functionality.
PS: Google are the evil people here. They deliberately removed this feature from Chrome and AOSP browser, and are punishing sites that don't serve mobile-specific content - i.e. content that is less usable for people who prefer zoom-based navigation.
I'm a fan of how my Windows Phone does it in 8.1 It gives me the option between mobile or desktop identification to sites, but then also gives me the option to use a Readability like function and constrict the content down so I don't have to side scroll. Seems to be the best of both worlds.
It's not there any more. See Bug 900564[1]. Basically, they removed the pref from beta and release builds last fall because they don't believe it works nearly well enough.
This is one reason In am delighted the Galaxy Nexus was abandoned by KitKat. I still have the one more mobile Browser that is capable of rendering text properly.
My general preference is the format that Readability will render.
Just the damned copy.
If you've got navigation elements, don't cram them into sidebars. Put them at the top of the page (but not fixed), or bottom (dittos).
For a huge number of sites, I disable presentation of headers, footers, and sidebars entirely. I'm not on the sites frequently enough to care to use them.
Some mobile sites do pretty well by removing extraneous elements, others cram in more fixed elements (top, bottom, or side), all of which send me running. There's simply not sufficient real estate to deal with that crap.
Increasingly, Web design isn't the solution, Web design is the problem.
I've suggested gently to the author of this site that he'd do better with balanced left/right margins, a 45em or so content width, semantic markup, and white backgrounds, but he's apparently not interested:
Seriously, when the easiest way to read content is to grab plain text via lynx or w3m, add Markdown, and re-export the page as HTML or PDF, you're doing it wrong.
I completely agree; what's more I find it really ironic that at the birth of the smartphone, Steve Jobs said (paraphrasing) "Great, now we have phones that can view the desktop web! Now we'll never have to write mobile specific sites again."
The best is when the desktop site fully loads and then some loading page comes up so that it can further load the "mobile experience" and then that "experience" turns out to be a total travesty.
Well I want to see the image for the article too. We're still figuring all this out anyway. I doubt that as long as people want to show ads on tiny space challenged screens (a very long time), reading news on a phone will suck.
I will also mention that I think having switched to an Android phone with a large screen (the Galaxy S5) has improved this problem for me. The iPhone screen is just too small and Apple really needs to make a larger screen phone because that tiny thing isn't competitive, but I'm a very big person with big hands and big pockets. The S5 is also a very good phone, the plastic casing is weird, but I just put it in a really nice case and I never even notice the cheap materials the thing is made with.
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I don't think the iPhone is too small at all. In comparison to others, yes, but standalone, I don't think so. I use pocket for reading anyways since all my articles are centralized.
Comments
Am I the only one who prefers to read websites in "desktop" mode?
I always feel totally alienated by the mobile page, there is information left out, annoying badly-implemented JS scrollers, etc...
The "desktop" site looks always more nice and familiar, and you can zoom and scroll around as you wish to read everything.
No, you're not alone. I almost always choose desktop mode where available, primarily because mobile sites disable zoom and choose settings for margins and font sizes that make their text almost unreadably large - frequently only two or three words per line, with masses of whitespace all around.
Reading such articles feels claustrophobic, because you're stuck in this long tunnel of text, with little visual indicator of how long it lasts, inducing anxiety about wasted time. If you're somewhere in the middle, it's a long trip back up to the top.
The close to optimal mobile browser for me was the original (AOSP) Android browser around 2.3. It rewrapped text on double-tap to fit in the visible page area, meaning you could choose what effective font size worked well for you. And zoom still worked, so you had a good handle on where you were on the page, and an easy way out of it.
Neither Firefox nor Chrome on Android are as good a browser for me. Unfortunately, getting the AOSP browser back is awkward, unless you want to use Dolphin or similar, and besides, it no longer has the rewrap functionality.
PS: Google are the evil people here. They deliberately removed this feature from Chrome and AOSP browser, and are punishing sites that don't serve mobile-specific content - i.e. content that is less usable for people who prefer zoom-based navigation.
I'm a fan of how my Windows Phone does it in 8.1 It gives me the option between mobile or desktop identification to sites, but then also gives me the option to use a Readability like function and constrict the content down so I don't have to side scroll. Seems to be the best of both worlds.
The feature is still in Firefox for Android. "Text Reflow" in settings.
It's not there any more. See Bug 900564[1]. Basically, they removed the pref from beta and release builds last fall because they don't believe it works nearly well enough.
[1]: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=900564
This is one reason In am delighted the Galaxy Nexus was abandoned by KitKat. I still have the one more mobile Browser that is capable of rendering text properly.
opera classic has fantastic wrapping
My general preference is the format that Readability will render.
Just the damned copy.
If you've got navigation elements, don't cram them into sidebars. Put them at the top of the page (but not fixed), or bottom (dittos).
For a huge number of sites, I disable presentation of headers, footers, and sidebars entirely. I'm not on the sites frequently enough to care to use them.
Some mobile sites do pretty well by removing extraneous elements, others cram in more fixed elements (top, bottom, or side), all of which send me running. There's simply not sufficient real estate to deal with that crap.
Increasingly, Web design isn't the solution, Web design is the problem.
I've suggested gently to the author of this site that he'd do better with balanced left/right margins, a 45em or so content width, semantic markup, and white backgrounds, but he's apparently not interested:
http://www.billdietrich.me/Reason/ReasonConsumption.html
Seriously, when the easiest way to read content is to grab plain text via lynx or w3m, add Markdown, and re-export the page as HTML or PDF, you're doing it wrong.
http://redd.it/256lxu
I completely agree; what's more I find it really ironic that at the birth of the smartphone, Steve Jobs said (paraphrasing) "Great, now we have phones that can view the desktop web! Now we'll never have to write mobile specific sites again."
I explain the feeling a bit more here: http://lelandbatey.com/posts/2014/02/shoot-your-mobile-site/
The best is when the desktop site fully loads and then some loading page comes up so that it can further load the "mobile experience" and then that "experience" turns out to be a total travesty.
Mobile sites should ONLY serve you text for an article. I don't understand how people don't understand this when created UI/UX for products.
Well I want to see the image for the article too. We're still figuring all this out anyway. I doubt that as long as people want to show ads on tiny space challenged screens (a very long time), reading news on a phone will suck.
I will also mention that I think having switched to an Android phone with a large screen (the Galaxy S5) has improved this problem for me. The iPhone screen is just too small and Apple really needs to make a larger screen phone because that tiny thing isn't competitive, but I'm a very big person with big hands and big pockets. The S5 is also a very good phone, the plastic casing is weird, but I just put it in a really nice case and I never even notice the cheap materials the thing is made with.
It's real easy.
[text] [image on new line, click to open in new window] [text continuation]
I don't think the iPhone is too small at all. In comparison to others, yes, but standalone, I don't think so. I use pocket for reading anyways since all my articles are centralized.