Curmudgeon time: reflow and zoom were probably my favorite features of the original Motorola Droid browser. There were zoom ( +, - ) buttons in the lower-right to zoom in and out -- accessible one handed, with your thumb, none of that pinch-to-zoom nonsense. And the text reflowed on zoom!
Further iterations of Android slowly stripped out these features -- first the buttons went, in favor of pinch-to-zoom, then reflow in favor of... a worse user experience.
Most sites with a lot of horizontal text (hello, HN!) are hard to read in portrait mode without constantly scrolling. Phones are faster than ever, I don't see why computational requirements would be a good reason for disabling reflow. Turn off all those damn animated-transparent-rounded transitions and give me back my reflow.
As far as I can tell, none of the major mobile OSes (Android, iOS, Windows Phone) ship with text reflow in the browser by default. Well, except HTC Android, according to the article. And that is maddening.
Further iterations of Android slowly stripped out these features -- first the buttons went, in favor of pinch-to-zoom, then reflow in favor of... a worse user experience.
Most sites with a lot of horizontal text (hello, HN!) are hard to read in portrait mode without constantly scrolling. Phones are faster than ever, I don't see why computational requirements would be a good reason for disabling reflow. Turn off all those damn animated-transparent-rounded transitions and give me back my reflow.
As far as I can tell, none of the major mobile OSes (Android, iOS, Windows Phone) ship with text reflow in the browser by default. Well, except HTC Android, according to the article. And that is maddening.