Two HN Announcements

I am clearly in the minority here, but I really don't mind (and somewhat enjoy) the mobile experience because I can glance at ~25 stories without scrolling instead of the 3-5 stories that the HN redesigns typically show without scrolling.

I use http://hn.premii.com/ on mobile. Slick and compact.

Visually it is stunning, however functionally, I use HN to glance at the top things happening in the tech/startup community and the premii link only shows me 6 stories before I have to scroll.

Yes, scrolling isn't that big of a deal, but neither is stunning design for the sake of stunning design. (Just my own personal opinion and I genuinely enjoy that you like that premii link; it just isn't for me)

I agree that information density can be lacking with some of the redesigns... but I want to point out that if you're able to read HN on a mobile screen it is because you are blessed with youth and/or good vision.

A lot of us can't make out the text when it is so small, so a ton of pinch-zooming is necessary, which is a rough user experience.

(That being said, at least pinch-zooming is an option... nothing bothers me more than when a site actively disabled zooming on mobile with the god-forsaken "user-scalable=no" meta viewport attribute!)

Could not agree more (re: youth/good vision) which is why I personally don't mind if there was a mobile optimized user experience.

My only hope in saying my comment is that I would have the ability to set the way HN is now as my default mobile viewing version and allow others to view the mobile optimized version.

There is also an app for Android that is somewhat similar to that one, and being an app it starts faster than the browser opening the website. In fact I enjoy reading HN from that app more than reading it from a desktop.

For me the ideal solution would be if you could pinch zoom and have the text wrap to the viewport. Best of both worlds. A handful of sites seem to support this (at least on the browser I use), but it's unfortunately not very common.

Try using Opera (just for HN), which lets you set text reflow when you pinch to zoom.

I get all 30 stories visible on my phone! .. in text which is about 1mm high.