Mobile/Readabilityv2
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< Mobile
Contents
Readability 2.0
Mission: Meet or Exceed iOS Readability, establish Firefox for Android as the most readable browser out there
Reads
- Algorithm description of font inflation: http://jwir3.wordpress.com/2012/07/30/font-inflation-fennec-and-you/
- Spec for text size adjust property: http://dev.w3.org/csswg/css-size-adjust/
CURRENT STATUS & ACTION ITEMS
Where are we? As of 05/09/14
- Open
- Double Tap to reflow on zoom
- bug 990821 - Improve reflow on zoom to a state that is acceptable for release
- bug 990259 - Double-tap zoom does not work when text reflow is enabled
- bug 1001563 - Double-tap zoom does not work on wsj.com (site compat)
- Font Inflation
- Full tree
- bug 707195 - Text inflation inflates comments on news.ycombinator.com to different sizes (because inflation computed separately for different table cells)
- bug 730603 - Font inflation incorrectly inflating feed of latest messages on www.facebook.com
- References
- Landed
- Open Source Fonts
- bug 831354 - Ship fonts for content in Firefox for Android
- Font Inflation
- bug 777089 - consider changing size mapping function for font inflation
- Double Tap to Reflow on Zoom
- bug 847872 - Only reflow zoom on double tap
- bug 900564 - Remove 'double tap to reflow' from settings (from beta and GA)
Notes
- https://etherpad.mozilla.org/readability20130118
- https://etherpad.mozilla.org/readability20130111
- https://etherpad.mozilla.org/readability0104
- https://etherpad.mozilla.org/readability1214
- https://etherpad.mozilla.org/readability1207
- https://etherpad.mozilla.org/readability1109
- https://etherpad.mozilla.org/readability1102
- https://etherpad.mozilla.org/readability1019
- https://etherpad.mozilla.org/readability1012
- https://etherpad.mozilla.org/readability1005
- https://etherpad.mozilla.org/0928
- https://etherpad.mozilla.org/readability0816
- https://etherpad.mozilla.org/Readability0725
- https://etherpad.mozilla.org/readability0716
- https://etherpad.mozilla.org/readability0706
Readability Team
Eng Management: blassey, mfinkle, madhava, jet
elancaster: pgm
dbaron:layout
lucas:front-end
sjohnson (irc: jwir3):layout
jkew (irc: jfkthame):layout
ian: UX
kats: mobile platform
Team members request iOS iPod Touch devices here:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=mozilla.org&format=itrequest
Useful Links
http://www.vanseodesign.com/web-design/legible-readable-typography/
http://blog.mozilla.org/nattokirai/
Competitive Analysis
- Opera/Stock browser uses reflow on zoom
- There are issues with this, namely there are problems that occur on Opera Mobile when panning after a zoom.
- Speed is an issue on Opera Mobile, too. Takes on the order of 2-4 seconds (on a Galaxy SII) for the reflow to complete after a zoom. Zooming back out seems to be much faster, though. Perhaps they do some sort of caching of the original reflow or something?
- Chrome does inflation & reflow
- Chrome doesn't do reflow on gesture. Kerning/linespacing isn't as nice
- iOS is generally seen as better than Android
- iPhone preserves appearance more than boost readability
- iOS hides their font inflation well (less intrusive)
- Also less aggressive, meaning that readability is sometimes sacrificed for layout (which isn't necessarily a bad thing, but I thought I would point it out).
- iOS more reliably picks the "correct" web font (see wired.com for ex.)
- iPhone preserves appearance more than boost readability
(may just be fennec bugs there)
UX Themes
- Balance Legibility vs. Beauty
- Font Rendering at zoom levels
- Use smaller fonts on a page, if rendered more crisply
- Improved letterspacing/kerning
- What is the user really wanting to see/read? Need this info from the front end to the layout engine
- Open Question: Meet or exceed the iPhone in aggregate vs. individual features?
- Font hinting keyed to a particular size/zoom
- Basic Typography Features are slightly better on iOS than Android - UPDATE: An initial comparison of iOS Safari to Nightly 17 on Android http://cl.ly/0p3X2A3U3F0N
Implementation Considerations
- Question: How much should we revisit font inflation decisions?
- Shipping our own fonts to replace:
- verdana, georgia, times
- droid sans, serf
- Ship better readable fonts. ( Adobe Myriad 'sans', Minion 'serif' as Arial/Helv/Times)
- We already have an app specific font directory
- Latin vs. non-latin basically the same rules (re: inflation)
- verdana, georgia, times
- Fennec Reader Mode (Lucas Rocha)
- Open question: Where else other than the browser to have Readability features? e-mail client? other apps?
- extract articles, headlines, typeset for readability
- readability.com API
- Open question: Where else other than the browser to have Readability features? e-mail client? other apps?
- Readability stylesheets for reading (1 or many?)
- Ultra-high Density Display Support
- Very Low Density Display Support (B2G @ 320 x 480)
- Text-size-adjust standardization?
- We have our own text engine, but not our own fonts. Can we leverage that?