/jp/ - Otaku Culture

>>23907382
>I don't know why decided to fuck things up for everyone when they could've just used that for mobile only.
WebDev and consumer trends.

As phone browsers have become further integrated and intercompatible with their desktop equivalents, there has been a push to utilize the same website across all browsers. In particular, because nearly everyone will be using some variant of Webkit (Safari) or Google's fork of Webkit, Blink (Chrome, Edge, Vivaldi, Brave, etc.), this means they really just have to design for one/both of those engines for it to run predictably across most platforms. The only notable engines this leaves out are Trident (IE), which is given the legacy treatment or unsupported, and Gecko (Firefox), where the Firefox development team generally succeeds in maintaining enough compatibility with Webkit/Blink for this to be a trivial issue on most sites (for now).

This has been pushed in the past few years with two primary goals:
1. Streamlining website development
2. Standardizing user interface/experience across devices

1 is primarily self-serving for the site owners. Easier to maintain, can be pushed out to all platforms at once, consolidation of bug reports/fixes, etc. Users aren't going to really notice the developmental difference, so it is understandably bullshit to them if the UI is worse (and especially if anti-features like adblock prevention are integrated).

2 is less bullshit if you consider the average user, but still probably bullshit for you, because you're probably a power user like me. Unless you assume every touch-based user will utilize an app if available (unlikely on tablets), the unified UI will be designed with interoperability for both both touch-based and mouse/keyboard input. Of course this compromise usually sucks more on the keyboard/mouse environments, but it usually doesn't suck to the point of becoming absolutely unusable as well. It also means that once users get used to the new design (if it is still usable, most people complain for a few weeks at most*), they will know how to navigate the site on all devices.

So even if you think it is bullshit/bad/wrong, there are concrete reasons why they did not stick to mobile only for this change, and instead pushed it for everyone.

* See Twitter's redesign. And if you use Twitter, try forcing an Internet Explorer user agent and compare the difference. If you're still using it, you got used to it despite how inferior it is on desktop.