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
And technical incompetence.
sysadmins and parents of newborns get the same amount of sleep.
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
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!
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!
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.
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.
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
My issue is that I shouldn't need an app to access the same info I can get via a browser on the desktop. Why, if that app does a better job, does it ask for permissions to data it has no need to access?
Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos
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.
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.
"Get a device with a big enough screen, and use the desktop version of the internet."
I would not have worded it the same way you did, but I agree.
The reason mobile versions of web sites suck, is because mobile devices suck.
They're okay for what they are. But there are reasons why books and newspapers (for hundreds-of-years-old classic examples) aren't printed on 2.5" x 4" paper. And that reason is: it is just plain not enough room to convey information well via the printed word. You can still fit it in if you make the print tiny, but then it's unreadable by half the population.
Period. End of story. Granted, some sites could do better, but you aren't going to change the basic, underlying problem.
Get a device with a big enough screen, and the internet isn't painful anymore. It's that simple.
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
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.
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?
Get a device with a big enough screen, and the internet isn't painful anymore. It's that simple.
Heh. That doesn't always help. A lot of the Internet is painful by design. They make it that way with malice aforethought.
A trivial example in the window I'm typing in right now: There's a horizontal scroll bar at the bottom of this /. window. OK, it has a width= attribute that shouldn't be there that's forcing it to a fixed width, right? Nope. I grabbed one of the resize handles on the window's border, and resized it a few times. No matter what size I made it on my (rather large) screen, the /. window is sized to be slightly wider than that. It dynamically detects the size, and forces the content to be wider.
This is fairly common, and the solution is trivial: Remove all the width= and other size attributes. There's nothing in this /. page that requires such things, and without them, the browser will "flow" the text so that everything fits. But /., like so many sites, tries doing something "clever" (i.e., dumb) with the sizes, and as a result, there's nothing I can do to make it fit.
This is known in legal circles as "with malice aforethought". The developers understand the problem quite well. If they didn't, they wouldn't be smart enough to use HTML in the first place. So they must be doing it intentionally.
And I've seen why this can happen. I've worked on a number of projects that needed a web interface. On many of them, I've gotten explicit orders that the pages must be sized to specific width, so they'll fit in the window the boss wants to use on his desktop. If the boss's desired size isn't the default, it won't be accepted. This sort of idiocy is quite common, and it's not easy to fight.
Actually, I have "fixed" it on a number of projects. These were cases where we had a good reason to have all pages delivered by a CGI program that parses the client's request, runs appropriate data-fetching and -munging subprocesses, and formats the results in HTML. I sneak in a little check of the HTTP_USER_AGENT, and if it's IE (which is the only browser that such bosses know exists), my code generates the required width= attributes; else it produces no sizing instructions at all. The results usually work fine on anything from a dumb "smartphone" to a humongous window on a humongous display. Or a small browser window on your screen, whatever it is. And it meets the boss's requirement for a fixed width on his screen.
So far, I haven't been caught performing such treachery by any of my bosses, but it's probably only a matter of time. They often believe that their web sites need only work on screens exactly like the one on their desk, and they explicitly order their developers to do it that way, or else.
This is just one of the many reasons for the problem we're discussing. It's yet another example of the old one about not attributing something to malice which may be explained by stupidity. (Quick, without googling it, which famous writer is that usually attributed to? ;-)
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
And certainly not something you'd ever do, since you haven't tried? I find my "smart" phone does plenty of things I'd rather not do on my desktop - simple games, getting a quick look at /. or stackoverflow (and forwarding pages for later reading to my InstaPaper account), listening to music, making calls or videocalls. Smart phones do plenty of things well, but reading long blocks of text is not one of them.
My issue is that I shouldn't need an app to access the same info I can get via a browser on the desktop. Why, if that app does a better job, does it ask for permissions to data it has no need to access?
Duh; one of its important jobs is sending that data back to its mother ship (or to the NSA. ;-)
Doesn't everyone understand that? Are there "smartphone" users dumb enough to think that the app isn't doing such things?
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
You carried a battery-operated pocket computer with 24-bit color, accelerated 3D graphics, a library of books (or music or movies or whatever), voice recognition, GPS-based navigation, a multi-point capacitive touchscreen, a surprisingly good digital camera or two, and a fast always-on wireless Internet connection in 1980?
Seriously. I do my real work with a multi-headed desktop, and I usually have one or more laptops in the trunk of the car for when I'm out and about, and I prefer to read books and magazines on paper.
But I do use my smartphone far more often than I anticipated -- if I want to Google some curiosity while sitting on the couch, find a recipe to use something that is on special at the grocery store, or if I'm chatting with someone (in real life) and I need to forward them an email, or document something with a photograph, or take a quick note without rounding up a pen and paper: I can just do it, and be done with that task, and move on to other things.
It even routes me around traffic congestion when driving, and gets me to the right bus/train/whatever station at the right time to get me where I'm going in an unfamiliar city.
And a myriad of other things. Pocket computers are useful tools for all sorts of stuff that I can't do with my desktop computer because, simply, the desktop computer does not fit into my pocket.
Do I edit spreadsheets and write code with it? No. But I could do so if I were strongly motivated to: It has an HDMI port and handles Bluetooth keyboards and mice just fine...but by the time I go through that amount of effort, I'm better off to fire up a laptop (which I will probably use with the tethering function on the pocket computer).
Then again, I do use it to ssh into various boxen to do various simple tasks while I'm out and about. It works just fine as a pocket-sized glass teletype.
Kid-proof tablet..
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
You really are going to tell people they need to install a different OS to see your bloated site?
"The days of using the web browser that came with your computer are over, mom." Get Firefox.
Maximizing a window is a holdover from the 4:3 aspect ratio era, where maximizing windows could still have content comfortably read. If one uses a 16:9 widescreen, they'd normally avoid that issue having the browser fill one-half of the screen (Windows 7 does this by Alt-Left), making a nice, readable page.
Plus half-filling the screen lets you put something else on the other half, like something to take notes.
But I do use my smartphone far more often than I anticipated -- if I want to Google some curiosity while sitting on the couch, find a recipe to use something that is on special at the grocery store, or if I'm chatting with someone (in real life) and I need to forward them an email, or document something with a photograph, or take a quick note without rounding up a pen and paper:
That's what concerns me, and why I don't get one. I'd keep finding more and more stuff I can do with it, and then pretty soon, I'm another little glowing screen zombie bumping into people in the supermarket because I'm fucking updating my goddamn Facebook status to tell everyone I'm buying olives and free-range soda pop at Whole Foods, and then I realize -- Holy shit OMG FML -- I have just become one of those little glowy-screen-zombie fuckers I dreaded. So I post my existential crisis on Google+ and Twitter it while I Instagram out a photo of this killer deal they have on red snapper. But wait! This app tells me that red snapper is cheaper at Trader Joes by a half a buck a pound, so I dash out to the car, bumping in to only 3 other Twatterers on the way out of the store, use my GPS nav to find my way the 4 blocks west to the other store.
Then I post on Facebook wondering how come I don't have any free time any more... and check it every 3 minutes to see who "liked" that and who didn't, and OMG! my sister in law just posted some new pictures (8,000 so far this month -- it's a newborn!) of her daughter -- so cute! So I like like like, right? Then I forget why I came to Trader Joe's, so I check my history... nope. Why did I come here? Aww, cute cat videos! Oh hell, I didn't check the NFL scores today, lemme do that real quick while I'm driving 10mph below the speed limit in the fast lane... etc etc etc.
Anyway, yeah. Basically, I don't want to become... you or any other little touchy screeny zombie. Because you know what? I plan my shopping. I download recipes, but I don't need them *at the store*. If I need to Google something, I get my ass off the couch and walk to my office. Same goes for forwarding emails. There is absolutely nothing internet-ish that is so fucking important that it can't wait til I get to my computer. There is nowhere, and no wait, so awfully boring that I can't amuse myself thinking, knitting, or reading a book.
Most of all, I live. Life is just fine without constant electronic distraction.
Sure, my friends tell me, "get a smart phone! You'll love it!" I'd probably love cocaine, too, which is why I don't try it.
That I'm right, and you don't like it, doesn't mean I'm a troll.
If one uses a 16:9 widescreen, they'd normally avoid that...
One will use one's browser however one wishes, and website designers might consider that.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Hmm.
I think you're missing something: Frugality.
1. When I'm standing in someone's far-away office talking to them about some problem or solution that has already been hashed out in email with other parties, it makes me more money (as opposed to less money) to be able to just instantly forward stuff to them...and then they can read it comfortably on their desktop.
2. When I'm driving and get swiftly re-routed automatically onto surface streets because the freeway (perhaps miles ahead) ahead has turned into a parking lot due to multiple accidents, it saves me money (both fuel and time == money).
3. When I'm at the store and there's an unadvertised special for some item that I'm not familiar with, I can quickly figure out what other ingredients I also want to buy to go with that item so that I can prepare a meal....or make an informed decision to not buy the thing at all.
Your answer to 1 is to waste time and resources waiting to get back to your precious desktop, and put the sharing of information with other people off until you get there.
Your answer to 2 is to waste time trapped in a traffic jam, because your precious desktop wasn't able to predict this.
Your answer to 3 is, apparently, to either ignore the unfamiliar special, or make two more trips (one there, one back) after finding a suitable recipe on your precious desktop.
And your rationale is...cocaine?
Keep on with your bad self. Meanwhile, I'll keep making my pocket computer accomplish useful work on my behalf and let it continue to help me be frugal.
Kid-proof tablet..