Should Google Reader Disable Mobile Browsing Option?

Over the weekend CN reader Daniel Hallac and I have been chatting about something he found while browsing CN on his iPhone. Daniel was reading a story in Google Reader and wanted to comment so he clicked from the story to CN. What he found when he reached CN was an "old-style" mobile page (see the screenshots below). The URL in the window was that of Google with a redirection link to CN. After some investigation, it turns out that Google Reader defaults outbound links to use a reformatted option (see arrow in image below).

Should Google Reader still default to this archaic option? On Daniel’s iPhone is a very slick Web browser. Why shouldn’t he get the full experience. From the feedback I’ve received, most users don’t know that this option even exists to turn off in Google Reader. On my Windows Mobile device I am running Opera Mobile and Skyfire – both browsers that can run full, rich Web experiences. I would also get some old-style mobile IE browsing option if clicking from a Google Reader link on my mobile.

Some of the chatter about the resize option seems to indicate Google made this a default to save on mobile bandwidth usage. Today most users are on unlimited plans on 3G networks and there’s just no reason to remove most of the usability and ability to interact with a Web site anymore. Let’s not forget that these resized Web pages are also completely running under the Google framework which allows Google to track all of the interactions.

From a Web publisher perspective, the resize option removes many of the potential monetization options for the content being requested. In the example below, all of the dynamic ads are removed and only the CN sponsor ads are displayed. The ads that are on the page are so poorly displayed that I doubt any reader would interact with them. What’s really interesting is that so many publishers use Google AdSense on their sites – this "resize" option also hurts the potential for Google to monetize sites as their ads don’t display either.

Clearly Google could check to see if the mobile device has a rich-media Web browser installed and if so, turn off the "resize" option for mobile browsing. It would be a substantially better experience for both readers and for Web publishers.