Ask HN: Is it just me or is mobile web browsing awful?
How is it that anyone still endures ads on the internet in the year 2023? Isn&#x27;t this a forum full of tech geeks? You guys do know you can download Brave browser for free, and that automatically blocks all ads on mobile. Or your choice of any other adblocker.<p>The problem with the web today isn&#x27;t ads and cookies--even most cookie banners nowadays make it easier with a button up front to &quot;reject all&quot; rather than individually de-selecting them. And if you really hate the banners, you can tell your browser to automatically accept them to hide them from popping up.<p>The problem is that every single website is super zoomed in with massive pictures, fonts, headers, footers, etc. that make the page a gigantic vertical scroll where you can&#x27;t scan the page to read anything.<p>It doesn&#x27;t matter how simplistic and barebones the site is, they&#x27;ll still make you scroll for miles jut to read 2 lines of text with 3 hyperlinks.<p>It used to be before that you could avoid the disaster of a mobile website by requesting the desktop site, but now there are no desktop sites anymore. The desktop site is the mobile site. They are one and the same, thanks to the monster of &quot;responsive design.&quot;<p>These asshole developers think they&#x27;re being clever by making the page different based on different screen widths, but it&#x27;s actually way worse.<p>Say I wanted to read a page on my phone, but it&#x27;s annoying as fuck since, like I said, it&#x27;s all zoomed in and requires so much scrolling my thumb would fall off. So, naturally, I change orientation to horizontal to fit more stuff on screen and reduce the amount of necessary scrolling.<p>WRONG!!<p>You see, now you&#x27;ve just changed the screen size, so the site automatically resizes everything to be way bigger, so you can rest assured the site will still be just as much of an awful pain to scroll through even in horizontal mode.<p>Does anybody remember how much easier it used to be to read websites when you had to pinch to zoom in&#x2F;out? It was so easy to see the whole page at a glance, pinch in on what you want to read or click on, and then there you go.<p>Not to mention, actual computers--laptop, desktop, even tablet--were actually fucking usable, since those are the main devices anybody would ever actually want to surf the web on. I wouldn&#x27;t want to read anything on a small phone screen for more than a few minutes, unless that&#x27;s all I am able to use.<p>Phones are meant to be used on the go. They were never the primary device, but always a compromise. You compromise the experience in order to gain mobility. Hence the name, &quot;mobile phone.&quot;<p>But at some point people decided, let&#x27;s just pretend mobile phones are the only devices that exist, because now they&#x27;re commonplace, apparently that means the huge market of everybody else doesn&#x27;t matter anymore, oh and also let&#x27;s make our mobile websites broken on mobile phones.<p>I can&#x27;t tell you how many times major, mainstream websites such as reddit and others have been downright broken on my iPhone. Buttons don&#x27;t work, or entire layouts appear incorrectly.<p>But even when they do  work correctly, they still don&#x27;t work well, because the &quot;mobile-friendly&quot; site was always the same as what was the &quot;desktop site.&quot; The myth that there is a separate kind of site optimized for mobile users is bullshit. The desktop&#x2F;laptop&#x2F;tablet-optimized site IS the mobile-optimized site.<p>If something is super zoomed in and super vertical, that is a paint to navigate on desktops just as much as it is a pain on smartphones.<p>And it&#x27;s not just my iPhone which is outdated. I&#x27;ve tried the brand new smartphones (really more like mini-tablets with cellular than a phone) and they&#x27;re just as terrible to experience. (In fact, they&#x27;re a lot worse! You can&#x27;t hold the phone in one hand and reach from the top to the bottom of the screen. The large screens make usability harder.)<p>What&#x27;s the point of massive screen sizes (hardware) when the websites (software) are so big, they nullify that extra screen space and in fact make the area of usable screen feel smaller?<p>That would be like having a book so large, the pages are the size of a door. But then you only print a single word on every page. It makes no sense!<p>Why can&#x27;t web designers just make their sites zoomed out by default, and then let us choose to zoom in if we need to?<p>Why can&#x27;t web designers have unfixed widths? The kind that automatically adapt text to fill whatever screen size you have. Not a fraction of the screen, but the full screen. Instead of always being skinny and narrow with tons of wasted whitespace on every device.