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Comment by nuclear_eclipse | Hacker News Reader

My initial perception is that all the Chrome features are great, primarily the data syncing with my desktop browsers. But the rendering is flawed; it doesn't render like the standard Android browser, doesn't render like desktop Chrome, and doesn't seem to even render consistent to itself.

For example, a few screenshots comparing the standard Browser view of this comment page and the way Chrome beta views it:

Browser: http://db.tt/kv3xP1Mk

Browser: http://db.tt/s7S6lCBN

Chrome beta: http://db.tt/p9YXoWJU

View on HN

It's apparently a feature:

"An issue that often pops up for mobile browsers is that text on the website may be too small to read properly. Where the Android Browser employs a text reflow algorithm to clarify the situation, Chrome for Android features a technique which we’ve called Font Boosting. It uses an algorithm to increase font sizes when necessary, aiming to make the text readable regardless of the zoom level."

(from http://peter.sh/2012/02/bringing-google-chrome-to-android)

Wow - I honestly can't decide if thats a horrible idea or not. But I can guarantee there's a ton of UX/UI folks who are going to get pissed that that.

It makes unreadable text readable for the user without requiring action on their part. Why would UX people get pissed? Seems more likely that web developers are the ones who will be uset.

Then their algorithm isn't consistent, as shown by screenshot. Some comments on HN are "boosted", while others remain tiny. This also makes it impossible to reliably hit any of the other page controls, like voting, without having to manually zoom way in and then back out.

Of course, the voting arrows are hard to hit even on a normal browser!

I actually really like the idea of adjusting text size like this, but the particular implementations of this idea may be less than ideal. I'll have to play around with it when I get the chance and see what it's like.

they're ok on a normal browser.. arrows are many pixels wide and the cursors are 1 or 2 pixels wide.

on mobile.. your finger takes like 50 pixels; so yeah.

On the other hand you cant read the text on Browser without zooming. So it is arguably an improvement. Suspect if HN was designed for mobile the result would seem less odd. Generally seems to make more stuff readable that otherwise isn't with less zooming, so an improvement. The voting controls on HN just need to be bigger!

Keep in mind that it's a beta

I remember seeing a very similar effect on my iPhone 3G with Safari. Since it only ever happened on Hacker News, I'd personally place the blame on the HTML here, rather than the browsers. When it works I prefer this rendering, I couldn't figure out what was different at first, I assumed it was just better tuned to my Galaxy Nexus screen size/dpi.

Also, one of the other features is a zoom window when you try and click on small link targets that are close together. Not tried it here yet but it worked beautifully on the similar up/down vote arrows on Reddit. (image showing it in action: http://i.imgur.com/UpWKF.jpg)

While it's indeed imperfect and inconsistent, in the 10 minutes I've spent playing with it, it does seem much, much easier to read and click links without zooming, which is quite a bit more important to me than it being slightly ugly. I'll definitely be using it over the stock browser.

Without testing, this particular issue looks like it could be handled with the viewport-tag and -webkit-text-size-adjust

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