this post was submitted on 08 Sep 2024
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I remember in 2005, pulling over and calling my sister for directions on my flip phone because I got lost.
I didn't get mobile internet until like 2010. Not because I couldn't, but because it was wildly expensive for a bad experience, since "mobile-friendly" was non-existent.
This was also during the era when Google Maps was a brand new website, not a app. I think I was still MapQuesting.
And now everything is mobile-first.
WIsh we could go back to the time where mobile-friendly was a thing, but using a desktop browser was a valid option too.
What sites are you having issues with on a desktop? I find pretty much everything is desktop first, and most are mobile-friendly. But maybe it's the sites we visit.
Every website that's mainly for displaying text (think into pages, blogs, Q&A) assumes your browser window is portrait like a phone screen. If I have widened my window I want the text to reach the edges, not float in a central column with masses of useless whitespace either side.
That has nothing to do with phones and everything to do with readability. It turns out, people have trouble reading overly long lines of text, so website developers tend to limit text to a certain width. It's also a little bit of carryover to pre-responsive design when websites had to work well on 800x600 desktop screens, as well as 1080p screens, but that hasn't really been a thing for many years now.
I like the second answer here:
Well I disagree, because I find having to scroll up and down more often makes it less readable, and if I wanted it to be thin I'd make the browser window thin. Return to 90s websites where the site just gives you the info and how to display it is left entirely to the browser and the user.
I remember paying a ton because I enabled mobile data in 2009 to check the score on a football game. My normal bill was ~$50/month for unlimited talk/text, and a few megs of data to check the score on one game doubled my bill that month.
It wasn't until 2011/2012 until I had a plan w/ data, and even then it was kind of expensive and slow. I remember switching to Google Fi pretty early on because it was only $10/GB, which was a really good deal at the time.
Around that time I was a swamper on a moving truck, we had been just using a map book, worked fine. The owner decided TomTom was the future, and wanted us using it, no arguments!
We're going down the highway, fully loaded, probably going a bit faster than we should, and TomTom, in it's infinite wisdom, yells "Sharp left here!" This is Canada, and we were halfway between exits, a sharp left turn would have put us through the concrete barriers and into oncoming traffic. Needless to say, we turned Tom off, and carried on with the map book...
There was also goog411 from 2007 to 2010. It was nice for finding phone numbers quickly and for free, but in hindsight, they were collecting vocal data.