← Back to context

Comment by Salgat

10 hours ago

I would kill for a web renaissance to return to this format of webpages, as least as an option. Not only loading improves, but also navigation and accessibility.

Indeed. That's why, when they finally kill old.reddit, I may legitimately stop using it entirely. They've already banned most of the good apps, forcing the pretty terrible official one.

  • New reddit is a travesty. It feels a satirical mockery of modern webdev

    • My favorite feature is how you click a reply notification and it takes you to a page that doesn’t show the reply half the time.

  • RedReader is a lovely, lightweight Android app for Reddit.

    Development is slow, but I've been happily using it since RiF was killed.

  • Recently the old reddit szopped working for me even after going to account settings and opting out of new design again (it was already marked as being opt out) across all my devices. Even after manually navigating to old.reddit.com, clicking any link would take me to new again. I had to install special extensions to reroute to old reddit everywhere.

> but also navigation and accessibility

Counterpoint, HN is notoriously hard to use on mobile (still better than some, but it's clearly designed for desktop, and not super responsive).

But agreed, that's independent of the slim nature of the webpage (which is still possible with a good mobile UX).

  • I dont get this. HN is probably one of the easiest sites i regularly use on mobile.

  • I've found HN pretty easy to use with both Chrome and Firefox on Android, at default zoom, with my own pocket supercomputer.

    Sometimes I manage to hit the updoot or downdoot buttons incorrectly, but that error happens so rarely that I'm amazed at my success.

    Responsiveness is very good, as well. Loading is lightning quick in all but the very worst network environments.

    It's not perfect by any means (the text box I'm writing this into really should be resizeable, for instance), but it's not bad at all...for me.

  • > Counterpoint, HN is notoriously hard to use on mobile

    No it's not, it's perfect on Vanadium with the zoom set to 125%. Much better than some bloated Javascript monstrosity.

    • It's very frustrating whenever this topic comes up that people see no middle ground between "the website as it is right now" and "some bloated JavaScript monstrosity". There is lots of room for improvement that would not turn it into "a bloated JavaScript monstrosity". How about bigger touch targets? Half the time when I go to vote on a comment on mobile I vote in the wrong direction and have to undo it. Same goes for using the search feature: I constantly fat-finger the drop-down search options on mobile.

      Even though I usually prefer mobile websites to apps, most of the time for HN I browse using Octal instead of the website because the website is such a pain. And it wouldn't take very much to make it better, which makes it so annoying that people have knee-jerk anger to the prospect every time the subject comes up.

      4 replies →

  • Agreed. To upvote I often zoom out to make sure I tap the upvote botton and no the downvote one!

Maybe someone can build a service that translates webpages into "reader mode" format, which you can then consume on mobile devices with low bitrates.

  • That's effectively what Opera Mini did. (And apparently still does, I had no idea it was still functional.)

One more realistic option could be to have an "LLM browsing proxy" where you chat with an LLM via text, and it does the browsing and parsing and extracting, with links etc.