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We have formally launched Mobile Stack Exchange via the blog!

All the key, essential pages have now been converted to mobile.

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There are some less frequently used pages which we are still working on, but the experience is solid enough now that we wanted to announce it on the blog. All credit to Jin and Kevin for getting this done; I think it looks and works great so far!

Thank you for your feedback in prior rounds. If you have any additional feedback (or bugs) to report based on the current state of Mobile Stack Exchange, let us know here.

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  • For ASP.NET MVC 4 we're planning on building in more support for mobile enabled web sites like what you've done. I'd be interested in hearing more details about how you went about it. We'd like our feature to reflect real world practices. Open the kimono! :)
    – Haacked
    Commented Jul 16, 2011 at 18:01
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    Could you please list the white-listed devices?
    – Lance Roberts
    Commented Jul 16, 2011 at 18:02
  • Where should we report devices we use for whitelisting / support? As far usage stats go, I've been avoiding this site on mobile because it's too clunky. I'd love to use the fixed version.
    – Benjamin Chambers
    Commented Jul 16, 2011 at 18:05
  • @ben list user agents you feel should be whitelisted in the answers, below
    – Jeff Atwood
    Commented Jul 16, 2011 at 18:18
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    @Haacked - I've documented the basic approach here. Ping me if you have any questions.
    – Kevin Montrose
    Commented Jul 17, 2011 at 4:09

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One thing I miss on the mobile site is that there is no easy way of filtering by my favorite tags. On the full site these are easily accessible from the front page, but I can't find them anywhere on the mobile site.

My favorite tags are by far the main places I go to find new questions aside from the front page, so for this reason I'm still using the full site on my phone, although the mobile version is looking quite nice otherwise.

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Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; U; Android 3.1; en-us; K1 Build/HMJ37) AppleWebKit/534.13(KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Safari/534.13

The most important thing here is the Android 3.x portion, which matches the default Android browser on 3.x Honeycomb tablets. Most Android tablets are large enough to view Stack Exchange sites as like desktop browsers, and the number of hover-only elements are small enough that the user experience is not compromised. Viewing the mobile version is an exercise in frustration. The elements appear so small that my fat fingers constantly misclick, and are dwarfed by the large amount of unused whitespace.

However, a less powerful and potentially more buggy JavaScript engine (For instance, Gaming is crashing the browser whenever I try to load the site in full right now, for some reason. This has not happened before.) means that I am hesitant in recommending the team to add this UA string immediately. More testing would ensure a better user experience on tablets, but I don't think the team is keen on supporting another platform in addition to smartphones.

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Please consider adding PSP as a mobile device

 Mozilla/4.0 (PSP (PlayStation Portable); 2.00)
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  • is this a modern browser? Does it render HTML content as well as, say, WebKit (Safari/Chrome)?
    – Jeff Atwood
    Commented Sep 25, 2011 at 18:33
  • @JeffAtwood: I'm not 100% sure, but I'd say, yes
    – genesis
    Commented Sep 25, 2011 at 19:10
  • I also use PSP sometimes. I'd love to be able to log in and post answers with it. I'd also be happy to test and carefully bug-report.
    – DanBeale
    Commented Sep 26, 2011 at 15:51
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Hyperlinks on the User Experience Stack Exchange mobile site (not sure if it's any different than default) are hard to distinguish from normal text.

The links are shaded dark red, while the text is black. There is no other distinguishing feature, such as bold or underline. This makes it very difficult to figure out what is a link in a body of text, especially if the user chose to create the link from a single word (like "here").

The easiest solution would simply to be to underline links embedded in text within answers. (Also consider padding such links a few pixels to make it easier to hit them on touch-based mobile platforms)

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  • You probably should create say that on [ux.meta] as well.
    – Loïc Wolff
    Commented Sep 12, 2011 at 13:09
  • Oh the irony :)
    – hammar
    Commented Sep 12, 2011 at 16:06
  • Well, the blog post about the mobile design said to post issues here, so...
    – Rahul
    Commented Sep 13, 2011 at 9:55
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Just curious: did you change the code block horizontal scrolling into line wraps on purpose?

I know many users are unaware of two-finger scrolling of preformatted blocks, especially as some devices don't show any scrollbars for that. But formatted code often looks bad when displayed using line wraps. And line wrapping makes table layouts look bad (or even very bad).

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  • Two-finger scrolling doesn't work reliably (or at all) on some of the Android devices I've tested with. Makes wrapping the only real option.
    – Kevin Montrose
    Commented Sep 12, 2011 at 20:53
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Have you considered whitelisting Kindle? It uses a version of Safari, the identifying part of the User-Agent of my Kindle seems to be Kindle/3.0.

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