https://philip.greenspun.com/flying/ is a web page from about 15 years ago. It is barely readable with Chrome on the iPhone. The HTML is super simple: a table with two cells and a hint to the browser to give 50 percent of the screen width to the first column. The phone can do voice recognition (well, sort of). Why can’t Chrome figure out a reasonable way to render this? (There were actually a bunch of research papers back in the 1990s about how to adapt web pages to the mobile devices of the day; nobody ever said “one day we’ll be able to get SXGA resolution into a postage stamp-sized area on the screen, so let’s just scale the thing down dimensionally”.)
7 thoughts on “Why are modern browsers so bad at rendering old HTML pages?”
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Looks decent enough on Edge, Firefox and Safari on a laptop. I think you simply forgot how ugly things were back then.
The world was a simpler place. People actually wrote HTML code instead of using a web creativity package to generate pages. Things looked like shit though and you mainly enjoy the textual content not the bloody looks of many websites. Hack, I remember a time when I actually prefer the consistent, pretty and organized walled gardens of AOL over the mess that was the rest of the internet.
That page would be a lot better with eight megabytes of third party javascript.
The typical Google employee has to be really good at solving hours of obscure algorithm problems without the benefit of a compiler & come up with 3 nonsense questions about the company to get hired, learn a new language every 3 months, but never make anything work.
I was shocked at how much tweaking I had to do on my blog to get it to read decently on a phone. You’d think in 2016 WordPress that works out of the box.
Modern browsers don’t expect <TABLE> to be used for formatting, as was common practice. You’re supposed to use DIV and CSS voodoo for that now.
When I open this in chrome on Android I get prompted by the browser to “make this page mobile friendly”. If I accept it gets rendered quite nicely.
Perhaps your browser is not modern enough?
the good news is that the google checker does say it’s going to look like crap on mobile, and what are all different things you can do to fix that.
https://search.google.com/test/mobile-friendly?id=q1iiATZeJu4aLTNyuJSKfw
it looks worse on my android/chrome phone than on their screenshot.
what chrisC said. I get a prompt to switch to mobile view.