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by comex
4075 days ago
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Personally, I find something enjoyable about viewing desktop websites on mobile and zooming in and out - something about an instinctive sense of place (navigation in two dimensions rather than the usual one of scrolling), combined with being able to navigate a truly densely packed interface on a small screen, rather than having to pare things down to some extent as you see in most mobile websites and apps, feels vaguely empowering. At its best, this creates something of an accidental zooming user interface[1]. A particularly good example is the New York Times desktop homepage, where zooming around something vaguely resembling a physical newspaper, organized by topic in a predictable layout, is just nicer than scrolling the linear list of articles on the mobile homepage, with only a few visible per screenful - it's no accident the former was featured repeatedly in earlier iPhone keynotes and advertising. These days they send mobile browsers the mobile site by default, but thankfully it has a "view desktop site" link; "modern" responsive websites may adapt better to screens of varying sizes, but they have the annoying side effect that you typically can't get to the desktop layout on mobile. (This would be pretty easy to fix for either the site or the browser, but I've never seen it implemented.) I don't know where you got Reddit from, but it has not only a modern mobile website[2], but multiple client apps available on iOS and Android. Yet I read Reddit on my phone exclusively using the desktop site. Same goes for Hacker News and the various third-party webapps and native apps. I've never used a non-iOS mobile OS for an extended period of time, so I don't really know what automatic reflow feels like in practice, but I can certainly imagine it would be useful to people with similar preferences to mine, in a way that mobile sites don't substitute for. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zooming_user_interface [2] https://m.reddit.com |
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Reddit is the example given in the thread parent (luos) linked to.
> but it has not only a modern mobile website[2]
Here're the exact first words from the m.reddit.com link you posted:
"Welcome to reddit's new mobile site. This is in beta"
reddit.com does NOT redirect to this site when you visit it on mobile. The thread parent linked to is entirely about Android Chrome accommodating non-mobile optimised sites like the current reddit.com, which is the canonical example given.