Hiding on mobile – bad practice?

[apopp13]

Hello! The company I work for likes to hide parts of websites on mobile when things get tricky. Is this considered bad practice or am I just overly concerned about not giving mobile users the full product? The parts that they like to hide are usually only images so it’s not like the content is getting chopped. Anyone got any insight for a relatively new front-end dev? Thanks!

[Shikkediel]

Only showing the most relevant content on smaller screens sounds like a decent approach to me. Mobile visitors are usually seeking the quickest access to the info they’re after so the less “clutter” the better.

[Senff]

In my opinion, it’s fine to hide “bells and whistles” on mobile, but not to hide any content (whether main content or sidebar content).

A mobile user shouldn’t be “penalized” by getting less information, just because they are on a smaller device.

[Shikkediel]

For ease I was taking content in the sense that it would comprise everything myself…

[VJ]

Hi guys,

in my opinion. hiding content in mobile or desktop is a bad thing. why because suppose if i have some content with images, i set a component .hide class for mobile devices. content and images does not appeared in mobile but its must loads in mobile. even if we hide some parts in our web pages, no of request is same images loads, content also loads, we are just hiding it. performance same as in desktop version.

better way is “if you don’t want to show some content or images do not generate code in certain resolutions”. use some functional stuff for it. load required files in mobile for performance. if you don’t want use functional stuff, keep two different html and css files one for mobile and one for desktop. its good way. if your site is responsive. you don’t want to keep two different html, css files for same thing. go with Javascript or Jquery libraries.

[csesdev]

When I am using mobile to browse web I want to check things fast. If you want to hide some unnecessary content than it’s all good in my opinion. However i found out that some of people just hide too much. For example some time ago on a jewelery shop i couldn’t check my order number when I needed.

[Shikkediel]

Just for general information – I’ve experienced that if an element is hidden, it’s background image will not automatically load…

[Beverleyh]

This is an interesting article on asset loading. In short, if you don’t want a background image to load, hide the parent element with display:none. Unfortunately, hiding the element that has the background image will still load the background image. https://timkadlec.com/2012/04/media-query-asset-downloading-results/

[Shikkediel]

Nice link, interesting to know indeed (seems my post wasn’t entirely accurate).

:-)

[Beverleyh]

No problem. I had it bookmarked so thought it would be useful to plant in this thread. But I wonder if anything has changed in the few years since the article was written? (2012)

[Shikkediel]

A small test I just did with Opera suggests that a background image from a hidden element will actually download but not if it’s the parent that’s hidden. So that part seems to have remained the same at least. I wouldn’t suspect many of the browser developers to have put in much effort into changing this behaviour since that blog was written…

codepen.io/jqLaQE

Just click to show the element (this will give some indication) – using F5 won’t work unfortunately but when clearing the browser cache, a repetitive test will show that the request for the url is not made in the “network” tab of dev tools.

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