Item — HN Reader

> but also navigation and accessibility

Counterpoint, HN is notoriously hard to use on mobile (still better than some, but it's clearly designed for desktop, and not super responsive).

But agreed, that's independent of the slim nature of the webpage (which is still possible with a good mobile UX).

6 comments

I've found HN pretty easy to use with both Chrome and Firefox on Android, at default zoom, with my own pocket supercomputer.

Sometimes I manage to hit the updoot or downdoot buttons incorrectly, but that error happens so rarely that I'm amazed at my success.

Responsiveness is very good, as well. Loading is lightning quick in all but the very worst network environments.

It's not perfect by any means (the text box I'm writing this into really should be resizeable, for instance), but it's not bad at all...for me.

Reader mode is nearly a must for me. Our eyes need a break.

HN in reader mode would be a such hugh blessing!

I dont get this. HN is probably one of the easiest sites i regularly use on mobile.

The uptoot and downtoot buttons are a liiiiitle too close to eachother tho

I find it works perfectly on Safari on iPhone.

> Counterpoint, HN is notoriously hard to use on mobile

No it's not, it's perfect on Vanadium with the zoom set to 125%. Much better than some bloated Javascript monstrosity.

It's very frustrating whenever this topic comes up that people see no middle ground between "the website as it is right now" and "some bloated JavaScript monstrosity". There is lots of room for improvement that would not turn it into "a bloated JavaScript monstrosity". How about bigger touch targets? Half the time when I go to vote on a comment on mobile I vote in the wrong direction and have to undo it. Same goes for using the search feature: I constantly fat-finger the drop-down search options on mobile.

Even though I usually prefer mobile websites to apps, most of the time for HN I browse using Octal instead of the website because the website is such a pain. And it wouldn't take very much to make it better, which makes it so annoying that people have knee-jerk anger to the prospect every time the subject comes up.

> How about bigger touch targets?

And lose even more precious space for reading? No thanks. Zoom in before you vote if it's a problem for you. You might say "how about drag up/down?" but then you can't scroll reliably on the page.

There's all this blank space to the left of the comment. Some of that could be used for bigger arrows.

Or some of the buttons on a comment could be hidden until you tap the comment. (And you can do it in CSS if div toggle is an offensive amount of javascript.)

There are some low-hanging fruit that would make the experience better. It's fine but it's not great.

The Octal app has better touch targets on mobile and manages to show more text at the same time. Here’s a pair of screenshots from my iPhone of the top of the “Is Rust Faster than C” comments. [0] is mobile Safari, [1] is Octal. The app shows more text.

This is exactly what makes me nuts about this whole debate: the complete lack of empiricism or nuance. People would rather just have their knee-jerk outrage about JavaScript or web design fads, instead of actually checking whether the things they’re saying are true.

[0]: https://imgur.com/a/aOvLFcM

[1]: https://imgur.com/a/7R14m4d

The font is bigger in your first example, the text uses twice the space (or your screenshots are different resolutions?). I greatly prefer it because it's easier to read. You could zoom out if you want, I guess.

But you could move the arrows to be to the right of the [-] and space them out a bit, sure, so they're easier to touch.

Anything that would introduce any amount of unneeded Javascript would make HN worse. It's the cancer of the modern Web. The current design shows that it isn't needed at all.

You do not need JS to make some things (vote arrows, for example) bigger on mobile, just CSS.

I'm using the "Glider" app for Android to access HN and its pretty awesome

Agreed. To upvote I often zoom out to make sure I tap the upvote botton and no the downvote one!