[g3e0]

I feel like I must be missing something, because I don't understand this author's point at all.

"Lots of websites think “Vertical Screen == Mobile User”!" No, they don't - They think a 720px wide screen is a tablet user, which is probably a fair assumption.

I could equally write "Just because I browse zoomed in 500% doesn't mean I'm on a mobile"

When you zoom in, things get bigger, so fewer of them will fit on the screen... You have a choice between horizontal scrolling, or the website showing you the version of itself designed for smaller viewports.

Looking at the "How it should render" screens - I just checked the Guardian site, and that is exactly how the website looks at 1080px wide. The author admits that because of their zoom solution they are running at an effective width of 720px, so maybe just.. don't do that??

The proposed solution doesn't seem to solve anything, because physical size of the screen isn't the full story, it also depends on how far away from the screen the user is - which the browser can never know.

[t-writescode]

They don't even think that.

I have one 1920x1080 monitor and one 1440p monitor. On both monitors, I regularly make it so that each screen is used by 2 applications.

A lot of websites think 960x980 is mobile. *half* of a 1080p screen.

It's bad and a huge assumption on their part that their website should only be seen in full-screen mode, or half of some 4k screen when the most popular resolution is ignored in a productivity usage.

[hinkley]

To expand on this, my work responsibilities often but don't exclusively involve monitoring logs or graphs, and usually I have one monitor dedicated to this. My goal is to encourage myself to look at it every time I remember to do so, and greasing the wheels means tiling windows so I don't have to touch anything. I'm peeking at them like my rear view mirrors.

If I haven't set up a vertical monitor, that's two browsers with half the screen (or 55% with some clever overlapping to clip margins). If I got around to rotating my display, that's could be a portrait window or still only 1100 pixels wide.

[kaishiro]

I'll play devil's advocate here and say it's not objectively "bad". Looking at the analytics of our most trafficked sites the "tween" widths (where 960px falls) are such a small fraction of overall traffic that convincing a client to pay for queries targeting that dead zone would essentially be a non-starter.

Ideally, would every website deliver aggressively optimized experiences across all viewport widths - sure. But at the end of the day someone is paying the bills.

[t-writescode]

And, admittedly, 90% view and everything seems to be how it’s supposed to be afterward.

My bigger problem is designers probably not using the website on normal machines, but instead on their 4K or 5k perfect color machines and assuming it works everywhere.

[TazeTSchnitzel]

Hell, the sites may just think it means the user has a narrow window. And that's reasonable. A nice thing about the responsive web is you can have a small browser window and it should work.

[jessriedel]

Why don't browsers tell the server whether the user has a touch screen? This seems like a perfectly reasonable thing that the website should know before delivering the page, and users who are hyper privacy focused could toggle a setting to not send this info.

[aembleton]

A touch screen has @media (pointer: coarse)

CSS can be used to style elements accordingly: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/@media/poin...

No need to get the server involved.

[jessriedel]

Thanks. Does the server really send the info to construct all possible page configurations for all possible devices? And if so, why are the websites still rendering with touch-interface objects when we doesn't have touch, as reported by OP? (The lack of touch screen ability seems like it should trump things like screen resolution.)

[ben-schaaf]

Laptops and desktops can have touchscreens too. When having a small viewport less stuff fits on screen and thus a different design is required, we may associate this with our smartphones but they also work for mouse/keyboard input.

[jessriedel]

I know large screens can have touch. I'm asking why they are sending the instructions for rendering a page requiring touch controls to devices that don't have touch interfaces. (Seems like a waste of bandwidth, but maybe it ends up being insignificant overall.)

[SulfurHexaFluri]

Because many laptop users have a touch screen.