[spirit557]

Does anyone else have this experience - The "old" pre-mobile phone style sites that were written without any "mobile experience" in mind are actually the most pleasant and easy to use on a phone (with just some extra zoom needed sometimes) while the mobile version of countless sites are actually the worst? Ironic isn't it.

[Cthulhu_]

It's in part because old displays had a screen resolution 640x480 or 800x600 back in the 90's, only a little more than phone displays (375x667 for something like an iphone SE, but at higher pixel densities).

Since the 90's, desktops went to 1024, 1920 / HD is mainstream now, and 3840 / 4K is on the rise for desktop.

[williamdclt]

I really don’t have this experience. I’d say these old-school sites are _not the worst_, and that _some_ mobile version of some websites manage to do worse. But it’s not a particularly pleasant experience, no

[corytheboyd]

Not really, the constant zooming is pretty awkward. I know this is the wrong opinion to have on HN, but at least having the content scale to the viewport appropriately is a much nicer experience.

Don’t get me wrong either, this is still a much much better mobile experience than popover garbage and JS dynamic wank.

[bigyikes]

Agree. The website is not usable with one thumb on mobile.

Maybe language models will bring back the concept of a “user agent”. One could imagine feeding a GPT the source for this page and receiving mobile-friendly source as output.

I’m looking forward to the day where the AI screens all markup rendered in my browser. (Let’s not think of how power inefficient this would be…)

[corytheboyd]

That's certainly one way to add <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1" />

:p

[aimor]

I wish I could, on mobile Firefox, force the viewport or at least easily change it.

    <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0">

[gsich]

This site is perfectly usable on mobile, without even trying to be "mobile first"-garbage.

[caleb-allen]

I mean, HTML was originally invented as an interchange format so that the client could adapt it back into whatever form was suitable.