Slashdot Mirror
Ask Slashdot: Why Do Mobile Versions of Websites Suck?
First time accepted submitter Kelbear writes "As user traffic over mobile devices grows in leaps and bounds, it's surprising to me as a layman that so many companies still have crippled and broken mobile pages in late 2013. There must be justifiable reasons for this, so: Fellow Slashdotters, can you please share the obstacles you've seen in your own companies that have delayed or defeated efforts to develop competent mobile sites? Are the issues in obtaining or maintaining compatibility driven by platform owners like Apple and Google?"
The mobile version chokes up my browser so badly that I frequently just close the tab and move on to other sites. It's very annoying that I can't see the regular site from my iPad. (Maybe if I logged, but I don't want to log in)
and no way to turn it off.
Mobile sites just make too many assumptions, with no way to configure. Mostly those assumptions have to with advertisements.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
The mobile version of Slashdot sucks hard.
SJWs are the new boogeyman. -Me
not for hours of detailed surfing on a site
if you want a good experience for mobile, code an app
And technical incompetence.
sysadmins and parents of newborns get the same amount of sleep.
Because CSS is pretty god damn horrible overall and still has horrible support for collapsing a column-based layout to a row-based layout for easy consumption on a tallscreen for things like mobiles.
And most developers cannot be bothered putting in the effort to make a decently collapsible site simply due to this.
Not to mention there are still developers out there making stupid fixed-width designs because they are still stuck in the IE age of thinking. (which itself is pretty damn retarded because you can make 100% flexible + fixed column layouts IN IE6 trivially! I did one while I was on holiday and spent like an hour:30 overall across 7 days for both 2 and 3 column support where the 1 or 2 columns were fixed widths and middle flexi)
So, generally? Developers suck. This isn't really news, most webdevs aren't remotely good at all, just like any group of developers really.
There are a bunch of decent mobile sites, but as always with most industries, most of X sucks regardless.
There are extremely few industries where that isn't the case, but webdev certainly is not one of those.
The mobile website for Slashdot is absolutely MISERABLE on my 3rd gen iPad! it literally sits there unresponsive for about 20 seconds. Ironically, the normal desktop version of the slashdot website loads and works almost instantly.
I really don't think that browsing the web on a mobile phone is all that popular, or even something that people want to do. And this comes from someone with unlimited data and a phone with a 4 inch screen. I rarely feel the need to just browse the web on my phone. I do lots of online things like read RSS feeds, listen to podcasts, read my email, look up maps, and lots of other stuff, but none of this requires a web browser. Just about anything that I'd want to do with my phone is much better done by an app, even if the site has a good mobile version. I'm getting a tablet this year for Christmas, and I'm looking forward to never having to use my phone for the web ever again. It's not because the sites are bad, but just that the kind of browsing I want to do requires more reading than I want to do on a cell phone.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Have you tried to load the slashdot site in a mobile browser. It sucks! Mobile versions should load quickly.
It doesn't seem to matter a whole lot any longer. Display the full-fidelity site and just pinch-zoom navigate if you can't see the content. This isn't a problem since most smartphones have high resolution displays nowadays.
There are some sites that try to go the extra mile with flexbox layouts though. Beyond that, it doesn't seem worth it.
Business is all about cost savings. There are way more frameworks available now than when they created their desktop bohemoth website. The frameworks tend to trend things towards one "feel". It seems the current frameworks aren't feeling what "we the users" want (about the same as the government thinks of "we the people" perhaps?).
If you consider that it's all about communicating information, smaller screens mean lower bandwidth.
Especially in a world where people seem to prefer passive information (i.e. "show me," instead of "teach me"), why would it be expected that a smaller screen with lower bandwidth wouldn't be worse?
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
When you Google something and select a result - the website redirects you to the mobile version of their home page - not the content you want. Thus, you can never get to what you are looking for...
Because developers aren't forced to use what they produce.
Phones inherently suck for browsing. What I'm saying is that they have intrinsic, objective, negative-value in terms of UI and enjoyment.
Mobile sites take _a_lot_ more effort - to get something working at, say, desktop + tablet + tablet portrait + small tablet + mobile landscape + mobile portrait takes (unsurprisingly) 6 times the design effort and often the same front-end development effort. Unless a project is aimed at the mobile market, most don't care enough to multiply their budget six times. Saying that a desktop site works fine on modern smartphone / retina displays is a fatuous comment - your fatuous fingers aren't going to scale to retina resolution when you poke that link. To make a site work well at that size it needs designing for that size.
Mobile PC? What's that? A notebook, right? Or one of those ones with detachable keyboards? Maybe you mean the ones with blutooth keyboard sold separately and the smaller (or, egad!, tiny) screens?
Yeah, the reason the mobile site sucks is because there is no such thing as a mobile personal computer. It's just a PC with a very capital P. If your hardware sucks, well, sorry man. Get with the times. I don't expect to play Gears of War on my 16 bit 80386 DOS machine.
There's this thing called Moore's Law. You see, and you're what we call an "Early Adopter". Early adopters have shitty times -- You decided to pay good money for a shitty experience. So, they keep selling you the shitty experience and you complain that you keep buying it. Sorry pal, no sympathy. By the time I re-engineer my stuff to work on "low powered" pieces of crap, they'll have caught up with my 6 year old dual core laptop which runs the web just fine (oops, too late, they already did).
The folks who didn't grok this made some shitty website designs because they were too dumb not to. When they did so their primary use case was still bigger screen devices with more power, so they didn't give it their best shot. Fuckers like the fools doing the Slashdot redesign are trying to make "One Design To Rule Them All" -- Instead of just laying down the law: You've got shitty hardware, your shit will be slow. And letting market forces sort it out.
Maybe a year or two ago, Slashdot on mobile was great. It looked and functioned relatively similarly to the full site, but was formatted for narrow phone screens. It worked great. You could read comments, configure the comments, post comments, and moderate. It was, in my opinion, a perfect blend of the functionality of the full site with a mobile-optimized site. Sadly, Dice threw that all out and now we have the horrid mobile slashdot site. Ironically the traditional desktop site is more usable on the mobile screen than the mobile site. The new slashdot beta, on the other hand, well it just proves Dice doesn't really understand what this site it bought actually is.
Kudos to the submitter for managing to submit a story that really is, "why does slashot mobile suck?" but in a form that the story moderators accepted.
Once the beta desktop site goes live, I expect to see a story, "Why do site redesigns suck?" Sadly participating in that conversation will be much more difficult as even figuring out how to read comments in a sane way seems to be impossible with the new beta, let alone posting!
I have this with the Amazon store from within the Kindle app. It's completely useless compared to the desktop website. Even things as simple as turning the author's name into a link to their other works just isn't there. And that's just a simple link, so it can't be because they need to make it work for simple devices. So they only reason I can come up with is that they simply don't care.
Just do a multi-column layout with a content column that is narrow enough to be comfortably read on a smartphone. That's it. On a smartphone you can then just zoom into the content and read it and if you want to look at all the side stuff, shift over. On larger screens you get all the content in a readable width (instead of lines 150 characters long) and with all the side stuff in view. Best of both worlds.
What totally, utterly sucks is the "responsive design" sites that load a MB of CSS and Javascript frameworks and libraries to adapt the layout to smaller screens and force you to download that one MB of stuff just to view 25 KB of content. Show me a site using responsive design that is actually responsive (as in loading quickly). My personal test is this: I stop breathing when I tap on a link and if I feel uncomfortable when the page finally is there it's no good. I use this test since 1994 and it still works!
It's not just mobile versions, as a rule of thumb web 2.0 sucks in general. Everything is bloated and hard to navigate because of said bloat. People use scripting and other crap for things that can be done just fine with regular HTML.
A couple of problems with mobile.
1) the website release schedule is generally 3-4 years. A company will keep a site for 3 years before replacing it. A site written without mobile in mind probably isn't going to get it until a major rebuild
2) Standards change biweekly. iDevices need special meta tags to function properly. Viewport width != window width anymore, and not all designers recognize that or compensate for it.
3) people are cheap and won't pay for it. desktop and Mobile takes more time, and therefore billable hours, than just desktop.
There are very good mobile websites, the problem is 99% of them are an afterthought. Oh we designed out website, now make a very simple mobile one quickly.
jQuery (mobile) has some awesome features that make the mobile version of a website fantastic.
Sadly it takes a site designer with real skills to make a good site that looks good across platforms, and that means expensive. Most companies barely want to pay the minimum for their website let alone what it takes to get a competent company that can make a fantastic one that also looks and works great on a mobile device.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
You mean WML version?
...they mostly think that mobile sites are a also run, non strategic asset, instead IT IS EXACTLY THE OPPOSITE, as the overwhelming majority of browsing or service discovery AND USAGE is ACTUALLY ON MOBILE....
Mobile sites should be the same site just with less/no flash and tighter layout. Beyond that, the site should be identical.
What is annoying about mobile sites is that frequently they're totally different and since they're second string productions they tend to be missing stuff.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
A "mobile" PC here is touch-controlled and ARM-powered. This usually means no hover and no SWF.
It's a chicken and egg problem:
No budget because no traffic, and no traffic because the site suck
When a web-site like Slashdot have 80% of their traffic through a regular fully-powered desktop browser, with a 19in+ Monitor, it is easy to make the math that 80% of the development budget should go to the regular web-site. Mobile web sites are usually an afterthought, because they do not generate enough traffic.
And do not forget the ROI (Return on investment) for e-comm sites, where they see that a mere 1% of the transaction done on their site comes from Mobile browsers and/or apps, while the rest is done on regular desktop browser.
As a (former, hopefully forever) Web Designer, I have to say one reason could be resistance from business owners who are obsessed with the "look and feel" of their website. Trying to cram a magazine ad onto a mobile screen (and make it legible) is a pain in the ass.
If phone makers would standardize screen sizes and resolutions then we could make great mobile sites. The problem is they don't and hence with every new phone we need to re-scale and re-deploy the sites.
Just look at slashdot's mobile site. It's horrible, and barely functional.
They could have done much better by just fixing one control (the full | abbreviated | hidden slider) to work with touch screens. Instead they gave us a new version of the site that fails to load any content if you open an article in a background tab in safari (probably the most common use case).
What causes this?
Over ambitious designers (It's going to look different anyway, why not start from scratch with a design that matches my personal taste?)
Over ambitious marketers (Our demographic wants to do only this one thing on the phone, we should cut all of the other functionality; really, trust us!)
Over ambitious managers (Why spend days tweaking the current site for mobile, when we can spend weeks estimating out the timeline to build a new mobile version of the site instead?)
Even if you do plan on a grand new mobile site, you should spend a little time fixing up your current site first to mitigate the risk of the larger project, and leave the main site easily available as an option (think of it as A B testing writ large, if that helps).
Just do a multi-column layout with a content column that is narrow enough to be comfortably read on a smartphone.
So once I've started with #bodytext {max-width: 32em} for comfortable reading without skipping or rereading lines, what "side stuff" should I add on wider screens such as desktop and large tablets? I've read complaints that a web design isn't "using the full width" of a 1920px wide maximized PC browser window.
Some video providers sell PC rights to one company and sell mobile rights to another. This produces "The content owner has not made this video available on mobile" error messages.
When I look at a Facebook comment section with a desktop user agent, I get "Comment using..." that lets me log in with the Yahoo!, AIM, or Microsoft account that I already have, but with a mobile user agent, I get "Login to Facebook to Post a Comment". Nobody has yet managed to convince me of the benefit of having a Facebook account.
Don't make a site work with a single screen size. Make it work with a range of screen sizes measured in ems. For example, use CSS3 media queries to serve to device widths less than 28em, a mini-tablet layout for less than 40em, a tablet layout for less than 56em, and the desktop interface for anything bigger than that.
just don't make a mobile version. please. you're not smart enough.
I hate going to websites on my phone and being kicked into some crippled view that doesn't have what I want. so just, don't.
I can navigate the sites I know very well on my phone's browser. no "help" needed.
Modern phones don't really need a mobile version of a site. As a user I usually find myself forcing the "desktop" version of the site when I can. As a web developer I usually tell people not to waste their money on a mobile version. Most mobile sites suck because someone decided they needed a mobile version either for cool factor or to please a boss. They didn't have a good budget and cut corners on every aspect. There are use cases where a website should be done in a mobile format and can be useful when the budget is available.
Lets start with good mobile sites. Those that should be mobile. These are sites that someone might access while actually on the go or need to do something quick. Think directions or ordering food. Most people don't want to shop Target from their phone. However a lot of people want to get directions to the closest Target. A good mobile site would prioritize the directions/location aspect. That works for retail and your standard service businesses. The other type is restaurants that deliver. When you are sitting in front of your TV and want to order a pizza, you obviously are in lazy mode. A restaurant mobile website can make the ordering process simple and quick. These are examples of use cases where mobile sites work and and should be used.
I think most mobile sites fall in the category of "we need a mobile site" This is where there is no budget and the client is offered a shitty mobile site so a developer can make a quick buck with buzz words. These sites tend to be created with generators or a general theme on a Wordpress site. Nothing special and usually makes the experience worse.
The last category is what you asked about. A good mobile friendly website. These are sites that don't fall into the restaurant/location (however I consider those ones that don't suck) category because they need more than just directions or ordering pizza. These types of sites cost a lot to develop. Developing a true user friendly mobile site is not easy. Think about developing a site for IE7, IE8, IE9, Safari, FF, and Chrome. Fairly standard a year or so ago. It took time. Now multiply that by 10. Ok so now you know the time involved to develop and test a good mobile site. However you only have a Galaxy S4 to test on. So now you need to go purchase multiple iPhones, multiple Android phones, a few iPads and maybe a few Android tablets. You can now start debugging on all these devices. Good luck! Oh and then ask your customers if they care. The ROI is not there.
This is why mobile sites suck. No one wants to invest the money to do it right. Even those that do invest the money either focus on a single platform or can't keep up with the ever changing community of mobile devices.
Taking some of the points from above you realize that you should just have a normal site and let people deal with zooming (pinching) in and out to click on links. Or maybe go for an app if you have something specialized.
If you want to surf the web, use a PC with a large monitor. People will complain "waaaahhh. The web site doesn't look perfect on phone model X" Maybe if phones used just standard HTML 2.0 with no images (a.k.a. Lynx browser) then you could scroll the page on your tiny screen. In the web site editor, do a File > Export > HTML2 and upload to a "phone" directory. Problem solved.
I'm a front end developer for large media websites, and a lot of what I do involves making those sites responsive so that they work well on mobile. A big part of the problem is that the development landscape is a lot like the desktop was in bad old days of IE 6 and 7. The debugging tools for mobile are all pretty sub-par. Working with iOS involves either owning an iPhone or using the tortuous iOS simulator (have fun awkwardly click-scrolling to the bottom of your site if you ever need to fix a problem in the footer), both of which restrict you to Safari's terrible developer panel. Debugging in Android is a degree worse; the SDK is a huge pain in the ass if you don't actually have an Android phone, and the proliferation of browsers and devices and OS versions make it nearly impossible to solve even simple problems in many cases. At this point my company only really offers support for the latest iOS safari and Chrome in Android. Anything beyond that is basically not feasible unless you want your developers to quit or go insane. It's really the wild west at this point, and that's not even touching the javascript execution issues on severely resource-constrained platforms. I won't get into that, since this guy already did a fantastic writeup of the problem: http://sealedabstract.com/rants/why-mobile-web-apps-are-slow/
So yeah, getting it right requires a lot of annoying, painstaking work with sub-par tools and a constantly shifting landscape. There's also the little mentioned fact that most of the devices that we target for responsive design were designed to handle full-sized sites gracefully, and most users prefer to just zoom the desktop site than deal with the odd omissions and restrictive behaviors of mobile sites. We generally refuse to do tablet responsive versions of sites for exactly this reason.
They shouldn't even exist. My phone has zoom, why would I want a dumbed down version of a site just because I'm using a phone?
Two steps will help you make a fairly simple site mobile-friendly: 1. include the meta viewport tag, and 2. make CSS3 media queries that, when the width is below a certain distance in ems, move the sidebars (if any) below the body text or hide them behind a JavaScript toggle button. If the only difference between "mobile" and "desktop" is the viewport width, you can debug this by resizing the browser window narrower and using your existing desktop browser's debugger.
First: cell phones were not originally designed to be web browsers, nor was the cell phone infrastructure
Second: the original web browsers and markup language were designed for the desktop, human-readability, and a hard-wired network
As a result, HTML is designed for human editing, not efficient processing in an under-powered resource-starved environment and it has been repeatedly junked-up with add-ons and "improvements" like CSS and Javascript which are also less than optimal solutions. Web sites, being ad-driven and having long assumed users browsing on desktops, are no longer simple - even "simple" pages are loaded with scripts, videos, etc and make assumptions (that the screen is at least 1024x768, that the client has unlimited local cache and unlimited horsepower, etc). Cell phones, designed to be low-power, light, and small, have small screens with every model having a seemingly random choice of resolution and dimensions while having often less-than-optimal user input schemes. Add-in that most sites still get most access from desktops (therefore most site development is spent on the regular version rather than the mobile version) and the result is an avalanche of hacks, instead of a properly designed solution for hypertext delivery to mobile devices.
They used to offer the core functionality, without all the extra clutter and crap the regular version had. Mobile websites were quicker to load. Then mobile exploded in the marketplace, more companies started paying more attention to their mobile presence, and now often the mobile sites are no better than the web versions.
Either are improved by focusing on functionality first.
When you Google something and select a result - the website redirects you to the mobile version of their home page - not the content you want. Thus, you can never get to what you are looking for...
Sorry but the obligatory XKCD comic for that complaint has already been posted.
Low bandwidth. Small screen. Basic keyboard. No mouse. Poor html and Javascript compatibility. Poor developer tools. An immature relatively crap platform makes for a poor user experience.
I'm a consulting commercial Web developer with decades of experience and mobiles take easily twice the time to deliver.
(This message typed from my phone and hating every word of it)
I can barely use Google's Mobile. Why?
1) They have turned off the ability to reverse pinch to make the text bigger.
2) They are using White Background with Gray Letters.
Really guys, does anyone test their software in enviroment that is not a designed "normal" mode.
The internet with it's structure allowed for the user to adjust character size to make it readable... Now, you turn it off! Some great help or equallizer!
If phone makers would standardize screen sizes and resolutions then we could make great mobile sites. The problem is they don't and hence with every new phone we need to re-scale and re-deploy the sites.
If site makers would deliver content instead of graphics then we could make a range of great mobile devices. The problem is they do not understand the meaning of the term "Markup Language".
They suck because they are made to fit their target audience: clueless tablets and smartphones users. Limited products for limited people without any real purpose for being there.
simple, its because doing *anything* with less than a 15" screen sucks, it isn't the sites fault. Wait till you need bifocals and you'll agree...
C|N>K
My smartphone has more pixels than my laptop, but the same 14yo seems to design the sites where you purposefully select the regular site, and every link you click reverts to the mobile version. Stop it. Let the user choose or just stick with a normal site designed for 1280 pixels wide and let the browser sort it out. Hint: the latter is easier.
For killing time with my Android phone. My problem with clients and mobile is feature creep. I suggest keeping it really simple and they go from there to wanting essentially an iPhone shell and all their data looking perfect in every phone, every where, every time.
Last company I worked for had a manager speak to a sales person for a contract company who convinced them that the mobile version should be contracted out. Gave the "Titanium" sales pitch of "we can build it once and give you a mobile app for every platform and a mobile web site too!"
These people were morons. The mobile version of a Titanium site is basically a generated HTML5 app that is disconnected from the existing web experience so links don't naturally transfer, etc. instead of an MVC like mobile template or even responsive HTML you get a completely disconnected experience.
No matter our level of expertise in trying to convince them of the merits of responsive design they bought the sales pitch. Company had no idea what they were getting into and botched the project, but they got a lot of our budget for that year...so there was that.
xkcd
Most relevant is the image tip text. Ran into this last night, with no ability to get to the link I had found via search engine. I had to give up on the site and go elsewhere. Is there a way to set Chrome Mobile to pretend to be a regular browser? (hey anyone remember the browser agent dropdown selection in old versions of opera)
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
You could only be wondering about broken mobile sites if you haven't looked at the mobile version of this site. Few mobile sites are less functional - excluding of course the earlier mobile version of this site which was amazingly even worse.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Thanks to CSS3's media queries, no site should need a "mobile version." You design one site and have it modify itself based on the browser's size. A good example of this is the Boston Globe's site. Go to the site in Chrome or FireFox (not IE) in a large, but not maximized browser. Now slowly resize the browser, making it smaller and smaller. As you do, the site will reconfigure itself from full-fledged desktop site to small-screen mobile site (with quite a few steps in between).
The benefit of this is, of course, that you don't need to maintain two or three different sites. You maintain one site and modify it to suit different sized browsers. Compare this to a mobile site which needs to redirect users to a different URL and often needs a completely separate development effort.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
You can usefully fit less information or interaction points in a 2" x 3" screen than you can in a 8" x 12" screen. You can kinda sorta work around that problem by designing interactions carefully to be easily done on touchscreens or keyboards, but you can't change that basic fact. That means more scrolling, pinching, etc to do what used to be a relatively fast point-click task.
I am officially gone from
The day before you purchased your mobile device, desktop browsers were rather rich in features and real estate and speed. But your mobile device, for all sorts of legitimate and illegitimate reasons isn't anywhere near as good as a desktop browser.
So first, you're asking me to build an alternative version of a site that's lesser in quality, functionality, and features. At some level, you chose the lesser browser, you get the lesser experience. It's not my fault that you chose a tiny screen on a slow computer.
Second, 90% of my business comes from people at other businesses. That means they are working at a desk with a proper desktop browser. I know, they *could* be working not at a desk, but the desk wasn't invented for the desktop computer. It was invented for the pen and paper -- which was always mobile. It's the desk where those people are the most productive, and that's where they are when they use/purchase my services.
Third, and this might be the big one, WAP. Remember WAP? Today, it's the perfect example. Hey, look, your site can work on mobile phones, in black and white, slow, and tiny, but mobile! Yeah, that lasted a good ten minutes. Every generation of mobile device has been shorter than the one before it. My clients are really not interested in dedicating funds to something for six months of indirect benefits. These are real-world businesses (as opposed to on-line services), if it's not profitable within one year for two years, then it's simply not better than the many other ways te spend the budget. It's that simple.
So, in summary, a) lesser and smaller isn't a better corporate image than your-device-breaks-it; b) my b2b customers are at a desk; c) it'll be totally different (and likely better on its own) in a few months so the value of changing it now simply isn't there.
Most of clients find that as long as the mobile device can read the majority of the content, and the phone number, that's enough.
When high-end mobiles had EDGE and QVGA, and many people were stuck with GPRS and 160px screens, mobile sites were absolutely necessary. But with today's phones, the question is not why mobile sites suck, but why we need mobile sites at all.
Over the past decade, the actual functionality of websites, aside from streaming video (which is huge, to be sure) has barely changed at all. Over the same decade, mobile hardware and software have advanced to match the low-end desktops of 2003. If video streaming is handled by separate apps (as it mostly is), there's little reason one website shouldn't work for both desktop and mobile use.
I only really see four differences between today's 1136x640 or 1280x720 phone and yesterday's 1024x768 desktop, as far as web browsing goes:
It seems like a tiny fraction of the effort spent on mobile sites (making a few changes to mobile browsers) could permit many existing sites to work just fine on both mobiles and desktops, and an additional fraction (making changes to those websites) would fix almost all the remaining ones. Fiddling with mouseover emulation and zooming clearly costs the user time vs. a good mobile-only site, but it's not at all clear to me that that's really true vs. an average mobile site (which, on average, is what you'll get) or that if it is, that the cost in wasted user time is less than the cost in developer time expended on creating and maintaining a mobile site.
Of course, this is all built on the assumption that a website that does A, B, and C today should be no more complicated and require no more resources than a website doing A, B, and C in 2003. While this may appear reasonable enough, Wirth's law says it's too much to expect. But a guy can dream, no?
Why is it that when I click the BACK button on the browser I get to the top of the previous slashdot page, and not back to the (vertical) point I originally departed from?
That's what I've seen in a very big company (100s of web sites)
Once you've met accessibility laws and blown this year's budget on new cookie laws and have done a lot to ensure privacy and security is a big cost and risk to be mobile friendly.
Add to that creative agencies who are GREAT at non-interactive but just getting good at desktop Web usability and mobile is tough. Agencies aren't always good with you going somewhere else for Web/mobile. And the interactive agencies aren't always good at understanding brand equity which is VERY important to the overall marketing strategy.
There are many other reasons (crappy old CMS). But I'd put legal and creative as the two biggest by far.
We've just released a new mobile browser for android. We have a number of innovative feature in the works to improve the mobile browsing experience. Fairly soon, we will release the desktop to mobile form factor converter feature, which will also retain the option to see the page in it's original format. Here are a list of other features that will happen soon (at least for Android > v4). Over time the list will also evolve to give higher priority for mobile and tablet optimized sites. Did I mention it gives you free WIFI too through our advanced connection manager? Good connectivity is a major barrier to a great mobile web experience.
The bs of must use bootstrap rather than actual spending the time to design and build media queries to Fit screen sizes... Bootstrap had its place but not in good design. Media queries are not that hard.
When Gamefly acquired Mobygames they changed the site "for mobile devices", and breaking all the vital functionality in the process while keeping things behind AJAX-powered loading swirls.
Thank god Reed bought the site off them and reverted things back before things got worse..
Another thing desktop UI has over iOS/Android is Home and End keys to go to the top and bottom of a page respectively, and a scroll bar with a draggable thumb to go to a specific percentage of the distance down the page. That and there's a lot more context around a big textarea like the one into which I'm typing this comment. On desktop, I see the parent post and the textarea, and the keyboard is a few inches below the bottom of the monitor. On mobile, I see the textarea and the on-screen keyboard, with no parent post unless I scroll back and forth, and Slashdot's mobile version appears to hide the parent post completely, making scrolling impossible.
Excellent website. Excellent post.
Slashdot, in particular, is essentially refusing my money and has for years. I mean, I know they make money from the ads. And I never block the ads qua block the ads. But I havent seen an ad since D2 showed up. Because at that point I simply had to remove slashdot from my whitelist, and quit allowing it to run javascript, just to keep it functional.
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Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
All 'versions' of websites suck. If you have different versions for different devices you have not a webpage. Web pages are display-device agnostic, a fundamental design feature of the web.
So the answer is, write a web page, not a 'mobile version' of some AJAX monstrosity, thanks.
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Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
Thanks to CSS3's media queries, no site should need a "mobile version." You design one site and have it modify itself based on the browser's size.
How much reordering of boxes is CSS capable of doing in response to a width threshold query that has triggered?
good example of this is the Boston Globe's site. Go to the site in Chrome or FireFox (not IE) in a large, but not maximized browser. Now slowly resize the browser, making it smaller and smaller.
I did this in Firefox 26.0 on Xubuntu 12.04 LTS, and after a few seconds of resizing, it automatically switched to the paywall notice: "Read as much as you want anywhere, anytime, and on any device with BostonGlobe.com for just 99 cents".
HTML 5 is dead until people stop using IE 8.
Windows XP extended support ends in April 2014. Windows Vista is eligible for an upgrade to IE 9 without charge, and Windows 7 and 8 are eligible for IE 11.
They have turned off the ability to reverse pinch to make the text bigger.
No, they have recommended that your browser turn it off. You can override this recommendation. Open Chrome for Android, click Overflow menu > Settings > Accessibility, and turn on Force enable zoom.
The real answer as to why most websites don't bother making working mobile versions of their websites (or allowing mobile users to view non-mobile versions of their site easily) is so that they can get you to download their ad-ridden mobile apps. Most websites that one would have reason to visit on a smartphone or tablet (CNN, Weather.com) force visitors to click through a prompt to install their app before you're even allowed to browse the mobile version of the site.
Most content providers opt to do this because it makes them more money (after all, advertisers are willing to pay more when they can display ads on a user's device at any time rather than simply when the website is visited).
http://xkcd.com/1174/
If your website is advertising driven then one of the problems is to find area to put some adverts. On a 1900x1200 monitor it is not so hard to find some space but when someone's thumb can cover an ad then oh well. So from that perspective it just makes the effort seem not worth it.
Also mobile is a pain in the ass to design for. An iPhone 3GS is 320x480. But some of these newer phones are pushing into the same pixel count as a laptop monitor yet aren't that much bigger than the 3GS screen size. So a 14 pixel high font on a desktop isn't too bad. Is quite small on an iPhone and is basically a dot on a new phone. There are all kinds of games that you can play to solve this but the pain is very high and the compromises many. So the look and feel has a tendency to be driven by the needs of technology (and thus the programmers) instead of a professional web designer.
The problem with an unstyled "MF website" is that when it's maximized across the 1920 pixel width of a desktop monitor, it's sort of hard to read text with 200-plus characters on a line. It's all too easy to get lost and accidentally skip or repeat a line.
In order to get my "responsive" mobile+desktop site working, I had to stop relying on common third-party libraries/framework like jQuery and Angular, which treat memory and CPU power like it's an infinite resource. Just be implementing a simple, stripped-down jQuery, and a simple DOM-based templating engine (rather than string-based) I was able to reduce performance bottlenecks to the point where it was the network that caused the significant delays on any modern tablet/cell, even if I included (but hid) multiple versions of the markup that the CSS hid if I was on a mobile.
And for those who think it's silly to have a desktop+mobile version, because "desktops are completely different lololol" try working in a shipping environment with touch screens before you run your mouth off. Not everything desktop relies on a mouse and keyboard these days, and given time constraints for these types of apps I'd rather not have to implement five versions of it when a single platform-consistent version works fine with only a few custom pages here and there.
Unfortunately the trend seems to be to optimize the site for mobile (all of them, at once) and say to-hell-with-PC-browsers. With extremely minimalist, Metro-like, stripped-of-any-useful-information pages now. So now the question has become "why do websites suck?". Lowest Common Denominator experience. Meetup.com went this way a few months ago and is now a shadow of its former self.
"You saved 1968." - Ms. Valerie Pringle to the crew of Apollo 8
As an independent developer, I can tell you why I avoid mobile devices in one word: variability. We follow w3c standards for our PC sites and have five browsers (Firefox, Crome, Opera, Safari, and Internet Explorer) to test against, each of which is free and each of which has a thousand pixels. In the mobile market there seem to be no standards, and ten versions of each browser, and ten versions of each operating system. Simply for testing we would have to fork over a couple thousand dollars for samples. The screens are small, yes, but worse is that the screens are of all sizes. Do we design for a width of 200 pixels? 300? 400? 500? Argh! Simpler to design for Firefox at 1024x764 pixels and let the wacko device you've got cope with scrolling.
It'll become easier in 105 days once developers are no longer expected to support an operating system that Microsoft itself no longer supports. Use IE conditional comments to show an in-page pop-up depending on the operating system version in the user agent string. Windows XP (Windows NT 5) After over twelve years, Microsoft is retiring support for your computer's operating system. As of April 8, 2014, Microsoft will no longer offer updates to fix known security problems, leaving you vulnerable to attack. Ask your local PC shop about upgrading to Windows 7, Windows 8, or Xubuntu. Windows Vista (Windows NT 6.0) You are eligible for a free upgrade to Internet Explorer 9. This fixes long-standing defects in Internet Explorer. Visit Microsoft's web site to learn how. Windows 7 (Windows NT 6.1) You are eligible for a free upgrade to Internet Explorer 11. This fixes long-standing defects in Internet Explorer. Visit Microsoft's web site to learn how.
You really are going to tell people they need to install a different OS to see your bloated site?
I see it as more like warning people that anyone who continues using Windows XP on an Internet-connected PC will end up hacked. Even if you use Firefox on Windows XP, someone might exploit the kernel of Windows XP to break into your computer.
One of the main reasons is that people that are accustomed to desktop are let down by mobile because it is a different interface. You can make a good mobile site, but people will hate it because it is not the same as the desktop.
Mobile means it moves, typically anything "smaller than a notebook". Notebooks traditionally are portable, but not considered mobile. And of course the line is blurred by using mobile and desktop operating systems for in-between devices like tablets. No, a tablet is not a notebook.
So the answer sounds like: because of people like you.
From the tone of your post, you are mocking mobile devices because you hate developing for them. And people who hate working on mobile make bad websites for mobile. That makes it your fault.
You are failing to even acknowledge phones, which these days can make calls but normally communicate every other way possible. That's how I know it's your fault.
I don't need fancy hardware to display a very simple page with minimal graphics, minimal dependency on layout, and minimal functionality. In fact, it is so very easy to make a simple site that works on all mobile browsers - you just don't work so hard at it.
Your focus on speed also seals the deal - it's not about processing speed. If a site is slow, I will most likely blame my device. But if I can't read anything because you wanted to have a floating menu that takes up 3/4 of the screen and causes re-flowing the page when I scroll, you're an asshat. Read HTML, show pictures, load some bits of CSS - that doesn't require speed.
To even focus on speed makes you Chief General In Charge Of Asshattery For Mobiles.
I read the desktop sites for just about every site, including slashdot and excluding Ars Technica, because the AJAX nonsense means I can't open links in a new tab/window. Nothing to do with speed or display - just basic broken functionality. And it is possible to allow both, and make sure your output works on the browsers that hit your site. With just a little pathos that can be accomplished.
Or you can continue being intentionally ignorant, making crappy sites, and blaming hardware for your incompetence.
Phones are, above all, portable. This means they will have small screens! Even an iPad has only a 10 inch screen, compared to desktop computers, which generally have at least 20-inch screens, or two. The fact is, the more real estate you have, the more you can do with it. Mobile sites have to make do with what little space is available, and they do that by leaving things out. Most sites don't spend that much time or money thinking about what to leave out, so they wind up with a poorly designed mobile site...if there is a mobile version at all. It's hard enough for many sites to create a quality "regular" site, and adding a mobile version nearly doubles the effort. It's just not worth the money, for a lot of sites.
Personally I hate mobile and tablets for one thing. Its forcing the web back to 1998 in terms of layout and even functionality.
Because making "one" site to accommodate mobile and desktop means you end up with garbage layouts like this:
http://www.msnbc.com/?cid=sky|ps|Google|b-Brand|msnbc
Secondly many of us thought we were past the days of having to create separate sites to accommodate different browsers and now.. sigh devices.
The biggest problem these days with mobile sites is the vast ammount of resolution differences between mobiles.. I Personally don't like mobile sites, they miss so much stuff or work really crappy.. Mostly i just tell the browser to load the regular site, but even those are getting worse and worse (because of a lot of junk being added to the sites which may look good on a desktop machine with a good cpu/gpu, but is just crap on anything else..) Facebook is one of the best examples on how crap a site can be on different browsers..
Fact.
which is solid puke.
because its new and people do not yet have the experience and tools.
The problem is the lack of real estate when browsing from a mobile device. The severely restricts how much content can be displayed. Combine that with the fact that touch screen interfaces make links awkward which in turn means links have to take up more space than normal and things get even worse (meaning fewer links buttons etc on the page). Finally since most sites fund themselves via ads one simply does not have enough space to display everything that the website wants to put up.
The same browser limits that prompted Jeffery Zeldman to say "To Hell With Bad Browsers" in the 90s are now in the mobile space. None of them adhere completely to standards.
Making a website under such circumstances totally sucks.
I have to use uBrowser for mobile browsing for various reasons.
It's a browser that uses a proxy to convert every web page to a lightweight version of it, and it does a very fine job. This makes the pages load faster, consume less memory and makes me pay much less for my phone bill (since I pay for data transfer only).
Some other browsers like the symbian one and Opera Mobile just crash with heavyweight web pages, because the phone consumes all of its memory, so uBrowser it's the only alternative.
The problem is that it just doesn't work well with javascript. I can't read long comments now in Slashdot because of this.
http://mobithinking.com/blog/google-mobile-seo
Two key highlights from the article:
including those irritating download-our-app interstitial ads
Faulty redirects - i.e. PC sites that redirect automatically to a mobile-optimized site that doesn’t have the same content
I occupy the post of point haired boss where I work. Back in 2002 I had to create a subscription web site that would provide facility management services to any one who took a subscription. Back then smart phones were a dream that folks were saying may happen soon. We had Excrement Exploder (IE) and Firefox. There was plenty of fragmentation with just those two web browsers. The programmers who were doing the work explained to me that we needed two versions of the site. They explained all the reasons why and the reasons they gave were valid. Now I am a cranky sort who never wants to do the same thing twice.
I told them to use only elements and tags that would work on both browsers. We are going to write it once and have it run everywhere. There was much wailing and gnashing of teeth over that statement.
Here is what happened, we did write one version of the site. It has survived all the versions of Excrement Exploder from 6 thru 10 with out any problems at all. It works with out modification in all versions of Firefox, Chrome, Safari and Opera. It also runs on any kind of tablet or smartphone, unmodified. All you need is a web browser on the phone or tablet.
The trick is to not use any special features of any kind. No special animations, no jquery nothing beyond, div, table, tr, td, some images and a style sheet. We did use flash for charts and graphs. We are modifying that so we can have charts on an IPad. Thank you Steve Jobs for having your head up your ass on that one. Our back end is, get ready for it, Cold Fusion. The net effect is we maintain a site that has an average page size between 50K and 90K delivered to the user. Google analytics tells us our page load times average between .7 and .9 seconds. Google analytics also rates all of our pages as 9.1 thru 9.5 for page weight where 10 is the best ranking.
If you want to build a web site that works, absolutely avoid the "amazing toys". You must be ruthless and say no to all the fads and the cool stuff. Never become a victim of complexity for complexities sake.
It costs money
I read Slashdot daily on my iPhone using Avantslash.
I think it works great and it's far better than m.slashdot.org - but then I'm biased as I wrote it. Yes, screen-scraping and reformatting is a little hacky, but this script has been required to read Slashdot on your phone for the past 10+ years. At the rate we're going, it'll probably be needed for at least another 5 years.
If you don't believe me then try the demo on your own mobile phone first.
Avantslash - View Slashdot cleanly on your mobile phone.
Company I work for had a program that designed for Windows. All it does is connect to a device in the field, download data, and configure the device. To use it in the field, our customers had to carry a laptop with them. Some of these locations were very remote. We ported the app to Windows CE but the handheld we were bundling it with cost $2,000.
In late 2008 or early 2009 I suggested we port it to iOS and Android, so that the customer could use a tablet or a mobile phone in the field. I was told by management that those were fads that wouldn't last. In Early 2010, after they dropped support for the CE version, I demonstrated how porting to Android and iOS could be done. I pointed out that once it was working on Android and iOS for mobile, it would be a short leap to get it to work on the Apple laptops our customers were showing up with. Was told it would be too hard to maintain multiple platforms. (We're only talking about a few thousand lines of code and a GUI for the Windows application). In 2012 when I brought it up again, I was told they had looked at it and decided it would be too expensive to build a "mobile" version of the application. Customers still have to carry a Windows laptop into the field.
While the example is an application, I think it's representative of what's going on with mobile websites. Upper management neither takes mobile seriously; nor, are they willing to invest equally in multiple platforms.
Right, damn browser. . .
handbags
I've been using http://slashdot.org/palm for years now. Loads super fast... lets me read what I need, and if I really want to read more comments than the top 5, I share it to "Pocket" on android so I can read it offline next time i'm on a plane or without data.
I think for websites like /. this palm version is the direction they should go. Of course, RSS works too - just use your favorite reader.
In my case, it's the product managers who can't seem to visualize a responsive site. As a programmer, I can use CSS media queries, third party libraries like Twitter Bootstrap, etc - but I'm only allowed to build what the product people specify. And they seem to keep specifying two separate web sites, and instead have us building features that users neither need nor want. In fact, we're still stuck with "splitter" opening pages, since the site has to appeal to two different classes of customer (B2B and B2C) and they can't imagine a splash page that appeals to both.
Currently about half our traffic comes from mobile browsers, and half from desktops - almost none from tablet devices. So my plan is to build a 2-mode responsive site with our 20-some most popular pages (90-some percent of traffic), then adapt the remaining pages as necessary, or remove them.
Even without knowing much about this, I can tell you: everyone is trying to code to new, non-standard UIs.
And I can predict what the solution will be: before this problem is solved the web browsers in the devices will get better, and we'll be back to coding for the web.
The only question is whether the mobile app startup bubble will go poof before or after that.
(By the way... wouldn't it be nice if all of this effort were directed to solving real problems? I'm pretty sure we could find some real problems if we looked...).
One mobile site that I often visit that doesn't suck is Texas Instruments'. I rely on it heavily for reference materials and stuff. They also have an Android app that covers all the reference stuff, and the component-finding for your particular application, but as of yet you can't order samples from the app like you can from the site.
It's awesome having an idea at 2am, loading up the site on your tablet, tracking down the smallest microcontroller with all the GPIO you need, then the support chips (Motor drivers, LED controllers, battery managers, etc.), and ordering free samples you'll have by week's end...all without leaving the comfort of your bed. :]
Friend: "The NIC is misconfigured..." Me: "No prob, I'll just telnet in and fix it." *Silence*
A tablet is capable of rendering a desktop version of a page reasnoably. As for a phone, not many people are going to be surfing the web on a phone. Those that are are usually looking to do one or two things (ie a google search, buy movie tickets, pay a bill, get directions, etc). Most sites where users want to do a specific feature on a phone already have mobile version or a phone app available.
Most people are not going to be reading a church website, a city or state website, trying to run Galaxy Zoo, or likewise on their cell phones, so why go through all the trouble to rewrite a site?
Now, there are a handful of people I know whom a cell phone is their only data-connection at home. Many of those will either go to a friend's house, library or work or the couple of times that they need a desktop for something (such as filling for unemployment or job searching or doing their taxes). It could be argued that maybe the unemployment office and welfare pages might benefit from mobile versions of their sites, but as those are government agencies, I don't expect to see that any time soon.
Truthfully, the reason that most places don't have a mobile site is that they don't need it. It is as simple as that.
if slashdot one didn't limit me to 3 stories at a time or whatver. My phone is more powerful than the computer I first read slashdot on.
I installed the "always desktop" addin to FF long ago specifically because ./'s mobile site sucked ass... now the only problem is, the normal version can't handle screen re-orientation. So I'll tick down through all the articles I haven't read yet and have maybe 10 tabs open ready for me to read... and if at any point while FF is open the screen goes from landscape to portrait, the layout gets all screwed up. Not just on the tab I'm on, but effing EVERY SINGLE TAB opened to a ./ article.
./ every day, and it's a constant annoyance. And I don't expect it to change because they leave js problems on this site broken for YEARS.
./ developers directly, and this is the first article I've seen where I can rant about this and be on-topic.
I read
Sorry, I just needed to get that off my chest. I don't see any official avenue to rant this at the
By the way, I don't see why everyone assumes that all mobile phone users prefer to browse the shitty portrait way when the screens are so much smaller. I have a Galaxy Note 2, and I always browse landscape.
Classic doesn't work. Slashdot is dead. Who wants to fork it?
The bar at the top needs a special kind of love I don't possess.
I hadn't the slightest objection to his spending his time planning massacres for the bourgeoisie... (P.G. Wodehouse)
Ever try to use a CMS or forum that was designed preHTML5?
Damn near all of them use tables that can't adapt to mobile screens, and none of them can deal with the proxy servers and carrier grade NAT that mobile devices are behind.
Planned obsolescence meets unintended consequences of complex CMS.
Pretty much my sites designed with xhtml1 work on mobile devices just fine, but newer stuff that uses vbulletin and Wordpress don't work very well on mobile devices because their theme systems assume 14" 1024x768 screens minimum. Most of them don't like wide screens either
Dear admin: Why you mod this as "Funny". I prefer avoid the mobile slashdot in my Android phone since instead to scroll the page it send me by force to the first comment. I prefer force the phone to see the full site instead. :P
Slashdot Beta is also absolutely terrible.
I think the reason many websites haven't updated is that they're too invested in a platform to just scrap the design and start over. So much goes into first getting a system for a site setup, to start over or create a second system is no small ordeal.
Seperation of content and layout is good design but seldom exists in the real world.
One site that is a pet peeve of mine for this is androidheadlines.com. Click a news article link from facebok or G+ to go to a news site about mobile platform and you're presented with a desktop site that you need to zoom to read. I don't know where they'd put all the as though if they did re-format for mobile which leads me to the other reason - lack of advertising revenue on mobile sites... sure you can have ads, just not great big tower and banner ads. Then when Mobile sites try those full screen ads that pop up when you go from page to page or first hit a site they loose audience.
And Mobile is still NEW, no-one wants to build out a site and then find out that flash no longer exisits on mobile, things need to be around for some time before big companies will want to spend the money to support all the bells and whistles.
on a related note, where I work we're finally taking the mobile plunge, and sunbuggy.com wil soon look like sunbuggy.org (the .com in beta) . We're doing this because we're seeing the same mobile traffic increase and many of our customers find us on mobile devices now.
"The Most Fun Possible on 4 wheels" is at SunBuggy in Las Vegas
Opera Mini FTFY.
Why does a news website with limited video need to send so much data? /. Mobile needs smartphone yet SPs can browse regular web pages? Someone please explain. TY
Even on the 4.3" screen of my near two year old LG Android phone I never want the useless Fisher Price version of web sites that is offered as the 'mobile' version.
I set the ID string for all the browsers I use to "desktop" but sites I visit still ignore it and use secondary methods like screen resolution or size to flip me back to the mobile site.
Servers should honor the settings in the browser and provide the requested and unbuggered site.
Lumpy's "ate his words" on that account for XMas dinner http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=4539709&cid=45664491 hahaha
This article summarizes the 7 sins of mobile websites:
http://10kloc.wordpress.com/2013/12/26/7-deadly-sins-of-mobile-websites/
Google videos hides the duration filter option on the mobile version, so it is a struggle to get videos longer than a soundbite. But that is the agenda, to create a culture of people who can only pay attention to something for a couple of minutes. Let's not even go into the catastrophe that the main youtube website has become since google took over - let alone the ridiculous mobile version. Almost useless and definitely too annoying to use seriously. The reason is because there is a culture of "hiding" options from users. The current generation of software designers believe that "less is more". They are mainly vacuous minded morons themselves, who cannot pay attention to anything for more than a minute or two. They are the kind of people who like the "Windows 8 Tile Screen". Unfortunately for the rest of us it means that completing common tasks has become a 10 click process.
Let me help you with your paradigm. You see apps as an application. Users see apps as a picture linked to the content they need. An app that launches a browser pointed to a specific URL is something similar in function to end users to something we've invented before and I'm sure you use: a bookmark.
It's actually quite useful for the end users and, while I'm sure you'll rail against it saying "they're doing it wrong," remember that's who we're ultimately here to code for.
If you actually read the content of the site, he states pretty clearly he's not saying sites need to be just a simple HTML page with no JavaScript. He says that sites that are slow and shitty are slow and shitty because people fuck them up. Overloading with JavaScript is a way they do that, but the point remains that over-design is the problem.