Mobile browsing is awful enough that I avoid it as much as possible. There's a few sites I trust or need that I use (wikipedia, a couple of news sites, train time tables), but otherwise I restrict my web browsing to the laptop.
It wouldn't need to be so, but as long as browsing on my phone makes me angry and frustrated, there's no point in engaging the Internet on my phone. I'll just use my phone was what it was intended for: reading ebooks.
Not OP, but while the article lists some things that make web browsing on mobile more irritating, the single worst thing about mobile web browsers is unmodifiably short cache times, combined with the fact that switching to another app sometimes, but not always means you've accidentally closed the app.
Unlike desktop browsers, mobile browsers will not allow you to leave a page open and come back to it without reloading the page, which makes them effectively useless for so many situations. Even just locking the screen while on a page may result in the page being reloaded as soon as you return and unlock the screen.
One of the major original benefits of having an always-on internet connection was the ability to look thinks up on the fly; to spend 10 seconds checking something on Google before continuing with what you're doing. With my N900, I used to be able to move through a webapp action by action, locking my phone to get out of the metro car, unlocking it on the way up the escalator, locking it for the walk to work, unlocking it on the elevator, and completing what I was doing as I sat down at my desk.
On modern mobile web browsers, this is impossible as far as I can tell. I can't even read the same webpage reliably in a dozen 10-15 second increments over an hour, because many of the times I unlock my phone to look at it, it reloads. If I'm really lucky and don't forget to leave it alone, it may eventually position the scroll back where I was. Of course, that takes up the 10 seconds I had, so now I'll roll the dice again in five minutes when I have 10 more seconds.
This is the single biggest problem I have with mobile browsing: I can't actually use the phone as a web browser the way I use my desktop web browser. The tabs are useless because they don't load and keep content. Multiple-action webapps are useless because the browser won't remember where I was even though I haven't deliberately exited the application. Articles or blog posts longer than 5-6 screens are pointless because I will not be able to read them in the times I have, because the browser assumes that I'm doing nothing else for the next 5 minutes nearly every time I open it, "Wait, wait, let's start over from the top, shall we?"
Infuriating.
TL;DR: the biggest problem with mobile browsing is the browsers, not the content.
That pretty much sums up my experience try to use an iPad on wifi for browsing. The browser seems to think I'm an idiot, it's to slow and tabs doesn't work. If the browser won't load the content of a tab in the back ground, then I fail to see the point in having tabs. The mobile devices I've used simply don't have the processing power to run a modern browser in my opinion.
After a few minutes with any mobile device I'm normally tense and angry and just give up and find a computer instead.
I also hate navigating on a touch screens, but that's sort of irrelevant in this context.
Since I switched to the iPad Mini 2 things have improved significantly for me, but even now I too often find myself opening tabs that take ages to load and, worst of all, need so much memory that all the other tabs are unloaded. In this case I'd say it's mainly the content that is the issue, not the browser, but still.
It's a great idea but designers always lop off features that don't scale down well instead of fixing them. Compare a user page in Reddit on mobile vs. desktop. The mobile version is pretty, but the information is lacking.
Another common issue with responsive design is that often the desktop assets are loaded even on the mobile version. Which aside from causing real issues (speed, blown bandwidth caps), just feels wrong and wasteful.
The article this discussion has a lot of the points that make it unpleasant to me.
Everything is slow. I don't dare touch the page until it's fully loaded (and I don't always know that has from the browser's progress bar) and stops jumping around. Pages are designed for bigger screens (they don't fit on my phone's screen in a useful way) or better eyes (fonts are really tiny). Also, the phone is just a bad device for doing anything complicated, such as following a link (hard to hit tiny links with thick fingers) or looking up information from multiple sources ("tab" handling is abysmal, at least with Chrome on Android). Etc.
Give a system-wide ad-blocker (AdAway) and Opera Mobile a try. You can zoom in and it will reflow the text to make it nicely readable. I wish I could switch to Firefox but the lack of reflow is an incredibly weird anti-feature.
I was very sensitive about this problem, and incredibly angered when text reflow was gradually dropped thanks to Google, and when of course Mozilla happily followed suit. But I must admit that on the web of today it is rarely an issue.
If you want text reflow on touch working on Firefox for Android, you've got this:
Oh, I too thought those would be workarounds but they are not.
The first two say: "This means it will only reflow ONE THING AT A TIME. If the page has 50 paragraphs, you will have to tap once on all 50 to reflow the whole thing."
Just tap on the next paragraph when scrolling. Scroll, tap, repeat. Your thumb will do that automatically while you're still reading the paragraph above.
EDIT: I just tried the third one by zooming in on a few desktop sites and I'm impressed. Make sure text size is set to "tiny" in the accessibility settings. It definitely works for me™.
It wouldn't need to be so, but as long as browsing on my phone makes me angry and frustrated, there's no point in engaging the Internet on my phone. I'll just use my phone was what it was intended for: reading ebooks.