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.
Comments
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