Do most forums usually work better on mobile devices compared to blogs?

In my experience, most forums including forums which don't use a mobile friendly themes work better on mobile devices.

Forums usually don't have a large navigational sidebar on the left or right of the screen which can make reading them difficult on a lower resolution smaller display which is usually found on a smartphone and tablets. Forums also don't have a lot of stuff on the website like pictures, videos, and a third-party commenting service like disqus, and Livefyre which takes a long time to fully load like blogs.

But, blogs usually have one or two large navigational sidebar on the left or right of the screen, so they take up a lot of space if the template is not a mobile template. Plus, a lot of blog sidebars contain large pictures, text, and sometimes auto-play video which can slow down a website's loading time, and make slower devices run slower because auto-play video and large picture files can use up a lot of RAM, and CPU devices on slower mobile devices. A lot of blogs also use third-party commenting services from Disqus, Livefyre, etc which seem to make comments and the page load slower.

Some blogs with mobile themes also seem to run slow because the blog's mobile theme still have a lot of scripts, images, videos, and other stuff which slow down my mobile devices.

I notice my mobile devices like tablets, laptops, and some desktop computers seem to freeze or crash more often when I am on a large blog. But, my devices don't freeze or crash as often if I am a forum.

2045 said:

I really depends on the software. Paid forum scripts, such as IPB, Burning Board and XenForo, are mobile-friendly by default and even if they have a sidebar, it is usually removed on mobile devices. I'm not really familiar with blog software, but I am pretty sure that there are a few mobile-friendly blog themes out there.

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I think the default theme for WordPress is now mobile-friendly where the sidebar is moved to the bottom of the website instead of staying at the side.

But, a lot of older themes are still not mobile-friendly themes, and may contain JavaScript for auto-loading pages as you scroll down which slow down some mobile devices. I visited a few blogs with auto-loading pages which made my tablet slowdown.

I think blogs are generally designed to be convenient where you don't need to press the "next page or next article link" instead of lightweight like most forums where a lot of visitors use older desktop computers to use them, and auto-loading pages and articles generally slow down less powerful computers.

A lot of Blogs are also designed to make money, so they use fullscreen ads, and many types of ads like banner, link, and auto-play video ads which can slowdown older computers and mobile devices. But, a forum is usually more about the community instead of making more money by using fullscreen ads and many types of ads. Some forums have a few banner picture, and text based ads. But, forums rarely use auto-play video and pop-up ads which can slowdown sites and slower computers.

In my experience, viewing a desktop forum theme on a 7 inch tablets is readable in both portrait and landscape viewing modes because many desktop forum themes don't have a large sidebar with many ads, widgets, and links which take up a large amount of horizontal space. Desktop forum themes mainly have a large horizontal rectangle section for displaying topics and replies, and a smaller box for displaying the poster's information like username, post counts, and member rank like admin, or mod.

Sometimes I prefer using the desktop theme on mobile devices like tablets because I like the look of the desktop theme better than the mobile theme.