from Hacker News

Ask HN: Why is http://News.YCombinator.com not mobile compatible?

by dopp on 12/5/11, 4:25 AM with 11 comments

I surf from my smart phone for a significant amount of time, and I'm sure I'm not alone. I couldn't help but notice that this site is not mobile compatible. Any particular reason as to why http://news.ycombinator.com is not compatible with smart phone browsers?

  • by comex on 12/5/11, 5:33 AM

    The desktop site is perfectly usable with some zooming in to hit the vote buttons. That's a hell of a lot more compatible than half the sites with "mobile" interfaces that look fancy but have terrible usability.

    (I've complained about some of these on HN before, but a particulary bad offender is that blog theme that lets mobile users swipe left or right to go to the previous or next blog post. Aside from being undiscoverable, ugly (since the swiping entirely misses the point of iOS's UI, acting only after a swipe has been completed rather than smoothly tracking the finger with an interface element-- Google Images also has this problem) and useless (who wants to skip to the previous or next blog entry in the middle of reading the current one?), this feature always catches my not-quite-vertical swipes and tries to take me off the page while I'm reading!

    Of course this doesn't have anything to do with Hacker News, but I think it's the mindset that adding a mobile site is solving a compatibility issue, thus always an improvement over inaction, that's responsible for the vast number of crappy mobile sites out there.)

  • by radq on 12/5/11, 7:01 AM

  • by aymeric on 12/8/11, 5:49 AM

    It might simply be the case of someone editing the live stylesheets to include the mobile media queries and make it look good on mobile and sending the file over to pg.

  • by adyus on 12/5/11, 4:29 AM

    It would seem easy to retrofit using something like Foundation (http://foundation.zurb.com/).

  • by mcav on 12/5/11, 4:40 AM

    There seems to be little bandwidth from its creators for substantial UI improvements. Fortunately, there are a few mobile apps, at least on iOS.

  • by storborg on 12/5/11, 5:21 AM

    In what way is it "not mobile compatible"? Works fine on any phone I've seen it on.

  • by Urgo on 12/5/11, 5:02 AM

    Sure you have to zoom in but otherwise it renders fine on android..

  • by billpatrianakos on 12/5/11, 8:35 AM

    Works fine for me. On my iPhone I automatically get redirected to ihackernews.com otherwise it's very readable on the iPad too. The new Reader in Safari in ios helps a lot with some articles.