Did Meh change the stylesheets for mobile browsers?
2The site recently started coming up very weird in my phone (Android 11, Chrome 102) and in unusable ways.
I’ll post a screenshot later. So far, I’m setting Chrome to force meh.com to use desktop mode, but that’s kind of defeating the point.
What doesn’t work is the text isn’t centered (left justified, zero or slightly negative margin, and with the banner obscured, also effectively with a negative margin) and pinch doesn’t work to move the page around and zoom in and out.
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Browser settings:
Just checked because I was curious–this is what mine looks like. I’m able to pinch/zoom on mine?
That sounds really frustrating though–definitely send some screenshots so we can see what’s up. I’m not sure if the phone is going to matter, but I’m using a pixel 6.
@riskybryzness Try the Forum page. I haven’t tried the main home page since I only view it at 11:01pm (Central) to continue my streak and to see what
crapquality value-priced products are beingfoistedsold today.@riskybryzness I see what you see for the home page, but I can only scroll up/down, and no pinch zoom is available.
Did google fuck with the mobile chrome UI and move pinch/zoom to some other control?
@mike808 fighting with giphy to upload a video–but I recorded what mine looks like. I’m able to pinch/zoom on mine both on the forum and the main page.
@mike808 @riskybryzness Using either the Meh app or the Brave browser on an S9, pinch/zoom works on main and forum. Brave is Chromium-based. The phone is running Android 10.
Desktop mode (that used to look and work like the mobile mode) with pinch and slide ability to view the different parts of the page quickly and zoom to the areas of interest without the really wide banner forcing the page size and making the centered content unreadably small.
Here’s what mobile mode looks like now.
And you can’t pinch zoom out or slide the page around to see the stuff cutoff on the left or the right.
It just sucks as a UX/UI now.
And here’s what a thread looks like.
For fucks sake, they might as well hace FORCED THAT SHIT ALL CAPS. Please, help my eyeballs!
I just hate forcing my browser to fix usability features that were working fine. And to make it worse, Chrome doesn’t have the ability to “know” which sites require desktop mode or not, so I have to force it for everything (breaking all of the other mobile-friendly websites) or turn if off and the meh.com usability sucks.
everything looks normal on mine.
galaxy S10e
same chrome version as @riskybryzness
Android 12
Is there a setting in my account or profile to help?
Did the CSS or webkit or site build tools get updated?
I can turn on the accessibility feature to override a site’s forced disabling of pinch zoom, and it helps, but shit still be fucked up. Text is forced to the left, and jammed up against the screen edge instead of centered.
@mike808 That’s really odd. I’m asking the team if they are having any issues with it as well. I’ll try and get back to you as soon as I hear back.
Might try clearing the cache for the app.
Just so the folks looking into it don’t get bent, I’m not saying the site is broken and completely unusable. It’s just painful to use the forums at the moment until it gets sorted. There’s something hinky going on between the mobile styling and my phone (Nokia X100, Android 12, Chrome 102).
It didn’t used to be like that as of 06/13 or so, and it’s a PITA (aka inconvenient) to switch back and forth between desktop mode and mobile mode.
I don’t think it’s my phone or Chrome, but who knows with so many hidden features, legacy compatibility borked-ness, and other weirdness going on simultaneously.
Tried playing with autorotate on/off, but no change.
@mike808
Have to turn my phone sideways to use features (Bold, Italics, link, quotes, add pic, add giphy/youtube/etc. to any reply. But that’s always been the case on my Android phones.
Haven’t noticed any issues that you’ve had, either on my old Note9 or new S22.
Here’s what mydevice.io has to say about my Nokia X100 (via MetroPCS, T-Mobile’s MVNO).
@mike808 980px is a bonkers width on mobile. It’s also unrelated to the JS screen.width or screen.height reported.
@mschuette That’s in desktop mode forced on. My bad.
Here’s the mobile mode version.
@mike808 ah, I see. We made a change to 428px a while back for iPhone Max people, but I guess the mobile width one-upmanship forges on. This would need to be a change on our end after all. If you have a way of adjusting your device pixel ratio (no idea if that’s commonly available) to something higher than 2.5 you could work around it in the mean time.
@mike808 basically your massive phone computer looks like a desktop to our forum. If you feel like tackling a user style sheet, that’s another way you may be able to make a new breakpoint that looks like our 428px one. I will get a bug entered for this, but it’s not gonna be first on our list.
@mschuette THANK YOU!! An explanation that makes sense.
I doubt consumer phones can adjust pixel ratios. Point me to the android or chrome setting and I’ll try. But that’s likely beyond normal folk.
I agree on the phones getting more massive. They’re practically tablets now and won’t fit in pockets without ripping them at the seams after a while.
Don’t you love patents and good old capitalist greed? It’s what makes everything incompatible with everything else because everyone is an “innovator” and “compatibility” is what also-rans (a nice way to say ‘loser’) build into their products. What utter shite.
And mobile landscape:
Have you been able to find a zoom setting in the browser while on an affected page and tried changing it?
Also, have you tried closing all the apps and restarting the phone?
100% serious.
@GLaDOS Yep. Cleared all meh.com data, restart.
I can turn on “force override disabled zoom on mobile pages” but it still has the goofy left-justified no-margin (or gutter) and I can only zoom to make it larger, not smaller.
Forcing desktop mode seems to give me back the closest how it used to look/work.
However, I can’t seem to tag just meh.com/forum pages for this. They’re either all desktop or not if I set it in the settings.
Hmm. I do launch the forum from a home page bookmark. Maybe I need to view the forum, turn on desktop mode (just for that page) and then save it to the homepage. Maybe it will “remember”.
Nope. Desktop mode is not persistent, and the setting that is persistent is global. Sigh.
Ok. I’ve found that:
However, if I leave the page (i.e. a link) to a topic, it’s borked again. Argghh. Close!
Just to bring anyone else following along up to speed. Some newer, larger devices use a screen width just bigger than we expect in our forum styles. This causes those phones to show the desktop experience, which really isn’t designed to fit that size. There is a workaround, but it requires Android developer mode. We cannot, in good faith, recommend anyone do that as a permanent fix. We have other higher priority issues we are already working on and in the queue for the near future, but we will add it to our list and get to it as we have resources available. Many thanks to @mike808 for doing a little testing and helping narrow in on the issue!
@mschuette Thank you!
For those that might have the same issue, visit mydevice.io (turn off forced desktop mode and put the device in portrait mode) and note the screen width in pixels (the number in the big font size in my screen shots above).
If that number is more than 428, then that’s the trigger that renders the page weird in mobile mode.
Android 12 devices have a developer mode setting that can help, but there is a fix on the way, so you don’t really have to resort to developer mode hackery (and then undo your hack after the fix is rolled out).
The number was chosen to be 428 because that’s the size of the largest screen Apple device used to determine that number (presumably to autodetect at what screen size is a “mobile” device or a “desktop” device).
Since then, in the war for the largest screens and pixel densities, my HMD Nokia X100 goes “one louder” to 432 pixels, and falling into the website style code treating my phone as a desktop which doesn’t have pinch/zoom or other autoscaling features that mobile and tablet devices have with different screen sizes and ratios.
/giphy spinal tap one louder
@tinamarie1974 Kept that giphy just for you to
stealrepurpose.This is how it should look
@mschuette
Any update on the roadmap to bump that maximum mobile screen width trigger to 432?
I did set the developer “Minimum Screen Width” to 426. The hard part is remembering I did that and to return my screen to its native resolution of 432.
Because those 6 pixels matter, and make the Nokia X100 so much better than those “tiny hands” Apple folk.
The setting is Smallest Width.
@mike808 no news. It’s all tangled up with potential improvements to be made for tablet sized devices which means this needs more consideration than just bump everything up. We are entering the convergence zone and it needs more planning. I have not forgotten about this.
@mschuette No worries. I’m also deep into insanely large scale multi-year, multiple stakeholders, Forbes 100 global enterprise effort involving some deeply technical issues with complex critical paths and dependency trees that look like VB spaghetti code from the 80s, or worse, PHP code.
I’ve set my settings, so life is good. I did notice that things look a little different, but not broken, so maybe some tweaks went in.
@mike808 You’ll be, I don’t know, happy(?) to know that Apple changes provided the impetus to update this. The latest iPhones are using 430px so now it matters. Since I was changing things, I used 432px as the cutoff. Hope your big weird phone enjoys the update!
@mschuette
FTFY:
The lastest iPhones are finally copying your 2-year old Nokia X100 Android phone features using 430px.
@mike808 but your phone is a rational 1080px @ 2.5dpr. The iPhones are 1290px @ 3.0dpr which is a weird choice.
@mike808 @mschuette We have a new offender in this area, the Pixel 7 Pro. The main page comes up okay in mobile mode, but the forums display in desktop/tinyfont. The thread is TL;DR, but remind me of the spec you need and I’ll try to find it.
Android SUCKS. When coding an android app for the first time, it took the development team forever and a day to figure out pixel density and how it is so inconsistent across even google hardware like pixel. And then playing around with the setting until we figured out what resolution and density we would support. I understand screen size and more importantly, resolution, but google found a way to make something straightforward very complicated.
@hammi99 More like the manufacturers of all the permutations of phone/handset, tablet, TV, refrigerators, “smart” devices with GUIs, and car Nav-o-tainment consoles kept demanding Google add their weird new mousecrap into it, or they just forked it and added their shit anyway.
That’s Capitalism for ya. The alternative is to decide how big is Meh’s “walled garden” of customers and support the site just for them, and everyone else you give them a “Yo shit be broke” and tell them to give their money to someone else.
Not every Darwin-Award-in-waiting visitor is entitled to requiring unlimited technical, development, and support from your company to gratify their self-entitlement.
I would say it is fair for Meh to analyze their server logs and collect screen telemetry to decide what they’re gonna code support for.
Its also fair to tell users unwilling to allow Meh to colect that screen telemetry (non-personally identifiable) that Meh isn’t interested in accommodating them or supporting whatever functions are broken as a consequence of their choice. No cake and eat it too.