I wonder if this means Hacker News rankings will go down (considering it's almost impossible to read on a mobile device). That aside I think this is a great idea; the rank changes are limited to mobile search only and provide users with better results.
I'm only curious how they make the determination as to what site is or isn't mobile friendly. Is this programatic (I would have to assume it is) in which case how do they determine this? Some sites can make a good mobile site but they do it in an assbackwards fashion (e.g. using JavaScript only for resizing and reflowing); would those be counted? Does it require CSS device selectors or anything similar? I feel like it has to be a combination of things but would really like to know what.
I had setup my robots.txt to disallow indexing of the Wordpress themes.. I had no idea that would make Google not use that to render the page, so it thought my site was not "mobile friendly".
For what it's worth, Hacker News works just fine on Windows Phone (mobile IE). I'd say it's one of the easier to read sites because it's ready in an instant and not busy adding layers 10 seconds after initial render, loading myriad JavaScript files, and injecting social media assets from third-party sites after I've already scrolled two pages down.
It loads fine in android too, it's just incredibly fiddly to click the comments link without clicking the story and you have to zoom to click the correct one of the up/down arrows. I'm pretty sure I've dished out a fair few down votes quite contrary to my actual intention over the last couple of years.
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.
> I wonder if this means Hacker News rankings will go down (considering it's almost impossible to read on a mobile device).
I think that many would receive this as a feature, not a bug. Part of the reason why HN looks the way it looks is to not become a popular site attracting too many visitors.
I'm only curious how they make the determination as to what site is or isn't mobile friendly. Is this programatic (I would have to assume it is) in which case how do they determine this? Some sites can make a good mobile site but they do it in an assbackwards fashion (e.g. using JavaScript only for resizing and reflowing); would those be counted? Does it require CSS device selectors or anything similar? I feel like it has to be a combination of things but would really like to know what.