Sorry, I don't agree with the statement. Some of the HN apps are much better to use and I would be more than glad to use their Mobile Web version instead of the current HN desktop version.
In fact, I don't like the current desktop version as well. I mean it's clean and simple but the page is too wide, so when the comments are long, I find it hard to keep my eyes on the same line. And the tiny buttons - I have to point my mouse to that 10px by 10px button to upvote something. Is there something like Reddit Enhancement Suite for HN?
I couldn't stand reading HN comments without collapsible comments. Trying to scroll past a top level comment chain that I didn't find interesting was very tedious.
There are a couple of problems on mobile (Chrome, iOS). Some of these appear to be faults in mobile rendering rather than actual faults with HN.
1) posting a very long unbroken line means entire page is zoomed out to accommodate that single long line. This makes the site harder to use.
2) posting a single very long unbroken line starting with four spaces means the text will be partly hidden. This fixes (1) above but causes a user has to scroll the text to read it. Scrolling the text in that single line is either impossible or very hard. I don't have enough patience to test which.
3) some people find the fonts too small.
4) those tiny vote buttons are too close!!
Some things that other mobile sites do that I hate:
1) steal focus
2) not render any text until the entire multi megabyte set of html, css, javascript and images have all downloaded.
3) start displaying text and then hide it until something happens.
Plain text is not accessible, but I've started to think that I would prefer just raw text than most of the websites I get served.
Disagree. I use HN on mobile for it's speed, not readability. Would love it if HN had a least one media query to allow for better readability on mobile.
In fact, I don't like the current desktop version as well. I mean it's clean and simple but the page is too wide, so when the comments are long, I find it hard to keep my eyes on the same line. And the tiny buttons - I have to point my mouse to that 10px by 10px button to upvote something. Is there something like Reddit Enhancement Suite for HN?