Sunday, November 4, 2012

Intelligent web page reflow - badly needed in Android tablets.

I bought a Samsung Galaxy tab 2 7" recently. One of the biggest problems I had was that general web browsing was not a very pleasant experience on it. The mobile versions of the web sites were too small for it; the desktop versions were mostly too big and awkward to navigate. Web pages need to be zoomed in and out like an image when reading, and  needs both horizontal and vertical scrolling, which is very annoying.

I'm quite surprised that (android) tablet browsers still haven't implemented an intelligent page reflow scheme which will reposition the page elements and resize the text to a comfortable size based on the screen resolution and physical screen size. Page should be readable by having to scroll only vertically; even better would be an automatic formatting into a flipboard like mechanism where we could just 'flip' pages, instead of scrolling. I find flipping is more natural than scrolling, and probably uses much less cpu cycles on the tab.