16 ms·

Please stop disabling zoom

620 points by zachflower 4y ago

rmetzler 4y ago
While we are at it: please stop changing the right mouse button in my browser. I‘m looking at you MS Teams. If you want to have context menus in your app, that’s ok, but please don’t put them in the browser. You break important use cases for me and other people.
- jeroenhd 4y ago
  Firefox has an override for that, shift+right mouse should ignore the click handlers and show the browser context menu. This is something I really miss in other browsers, especially the ones that decide that they know better than me about how things like copy/paste are supposed to work.
  - tomcatfish 4y ago
    I have never heard this before. Is there more stuff like this? Note: I can't test this right now because I don't have any sites that do this particular bad thing
    - jeroenhd 4y ago
      This website [1] (actually, its codepen [2]) has a demo and even describes all the user-hostile reasons why developers might want to disable the right click menu. There are some other accessibility tricks that Firefox advertises [3] like ignoring website font and color choices. Firefox also has native support for overriding website CSS [5] but "modern" websites often come with impossible to understand DOM and CSS structures (if they even use CSS and not just forcefully insert style into the DOM directly because separation of concerns is for losers I guess). Then there are websites like Github and some shitty forum software that insist on hijacking keyboard shortcuts like Ctrl+F and Ctrl+K. You can go into about:config and set permissions.default.shortcuts to 2 (Services.perms.DENY_ACTION) to block websites from overriding shortcut settings by default. You can go into the site settings and manually enable them again by going to page info (ctrl+i), then tabbing over to permissions, and changing the value for "override keyboard shortcuts" from "default" to "allow". Or, you could simply block the websites that offend you from that screen without changing the default. [1]: https://www.codeinwp.com/snippets/disable-right-click-context-menu/ https://www.codeinwp.com/snippets/disable-right-click-contex... [2]: https://codepen.io/impressivewebs/embed/zYYxepW?height=265&theme-id=0&default-tab=result#result-box https://codepen.io/impressivewebs/embed/zYYxepW?height=265&t... [3]: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/accessibility-features-firefox-make-firefox-and-we https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/accessibility-features-... [4]: https://superuser.com/questions/318912/how-can-i-override-the-css-of-a-site-in-firefox-with-usercontent-css https://superuser.com/questions/318912/how-can-i-override-th...
timtas 4y ago
If I can't zoom in on photos, the site is broken.
moffkalast 4y ago
- shreshthmohan 4y ago
  A great way to annoy a big chunk of your site's users too. Classic dig own grave.
amluto 4y ago
It’s not just accessibility. I’ve last track of the number of times I’ve seen a mobile website with a table that extends past the right side of the viewport and zoom disabled. You can’t scroll, and you can’t zoom, so you can’t read the table.
- Reason077 4y ago
  What mobile browser? On iOS Safari, all the example websites mentioned by the OP allowed me to zoom. I guess Safari doesn’t allow zoom to be disabled by websites? Maybe all browsers should work this way?
  - Saint_Genet 4y ago
    It says so in the article
  - rectang 4y ago
    I use iOS Firefox, because I love desktop Firefox and I have Firefo set up with account sync across all my devices. But there's a feature of desktop Firefox which isn't available on the iOS version: remember zoom setting for a domain. iOS Firefox does have pinch-to-zoom, but having to use it every time I navigate to a page is tiresome. iOS Firefox is a small niche choice and not the same codebase as desktop Firefox because Apple requires that you use their rendering engine. So I'm not sure it makes sense for Mozilla to dedicate the kind of resources to it to implement all the features I might want, and I don't have a lot of gripes. But as a datapoint in this thread, zoom is really important to me, and I miss it when it's not available. I shake my head every time I visit Google search results on my iPad because the text is so tiny.
  - bradlys 4y ago
    I've had this happen on iOS Safari. It happens everywhere.
    - Reason077 4y ago
      Weird. I don’t see this, or maybe I’m misunderstanding the problem. Do you have an example site?
renewiltord 4y ago
Looks like a user agent concern.
- emteycz 4y ago
  No. Sometimes it's good to disable zoom (e. g. in web apps that function as a big canvas, like Figma). Pages should use the feature correctly. People shouldn't have to fiddle with browser settings just because someone can't CSS properly.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - bartread 4y ago
    I think this is where I have to point out that 50% of people who CSS are worse than average at CSS, depending upon exactly how you define "average". You're absolutely right: pages should use the feature correctly, but some won't (because of my previous point or, much less frequently, out of sheer stubbornness/malice/whatever), so I'm extremely glad that browsers offer a workaround via settings for situations where that's the case.
  - _moof 4y ago
    If there's one thing that's true about web design, it's that pages won't use the feature correctly, no matter what the feature is.
  - runnerup 4y ago
    I agree with the grandparent. While I believe it’s irresponsible for web developers to inappropriately lock zoom…I also believe it’s grossly irresponsible for the browser to not provide an override for this. One of the worst offenses for me is when the website dynamically resizes everything so that zoom “works” but a split second later everything goes back the way it was. I would also like browsers to have a quick/accessible workaround for that behavior too.
  - jhugo 4y ago
    The user is zooming because what they see is not legible to them. If Figma can't work out how to handle that, that's Figma's failing.
hallway_monitor 4y ago
Yes it is silly. The article actually ends with some useful tips: As a user, you can force allow zooming: In Firefox find the settings, select “Accessibility” and activate “Zoom on all website” In Chrome find the settings, select “Accessibility” and check “Force enable zoom”
- kevincox 4y ago
  Unfortunately this also disables it on sites where it makes sense. For example I have a simple tool to pick a random person or split people into groups https://playerone.kevincox.ca/ https://playerone.kevincox.ca/ Without zoom disabled 5 people putting their fingers on a screen looks a lot like a pinch gesture. Disabling the default event handlers only works some of the time. This is a common problem with the web, we can't have nice things because people use them poorly.
  - pvorb 4y ago
    That tool is a gem! I didn't have many situations where I could have used this during the past two years, but things seem to become a little better now.
    - kevincox 4y ago
      Thanks for the kind words. The same for me, I used to use this at least weekly, but now I'm lucky if I open it in a month (although regular board games are coming back to my life). Pro tip: Double tap for a few more options.
  - iggldiggl 4y ago
    Yep, exactly this. I have that setting enabled myself due to e.g. Blogspot inappropriately blocking zoom in its default mobile template — but on the other hand it does unfortunately mean that e.g. on openstreetmap.org I occasionally end up zooming the page instead of zooming the map…
  - fold3 4y ago
    For whats it's worth, I'm trying to test the issue on your website with either chromium or Firefox on android 12 and it doesn't zoom.
chunkyks 4y ago
But then the website might not look like the designer's glistening perfect vision, that only ever worked properly in their browser on their desktop in the first place.
- MrBuddyCasino 4y ago
  The reason this is done is to get rid of extra latency when processing user input. I guess detecting zoom gestures needs some time to distinguish them from normal clicks?
  - _jal 4y ago
    I wonder if it helps them detect when I leave and go search for something that works.
  - chunkyks 4y ago
    Presuming you are correct: * Some number of people are sensitive to latency * Some people are unable to read my website You're gambling that there are more people who would walk away due to latency, than there are who would walk away due to being unable to interact with your site at all. Personally I suspect that to be a poor tradeoff.
    - iamsaitam 4y ago
      Everyone will be affected by the latency vs a few will be affected by the lack of accessibility. This is what your tradeoff is.
electroly 4y ago
In the old days you needed to disable zoom in order to get click events immediately, rather than delayed a bit so it can tell whether it's really going to be a zoom operation. Is that still true?
- bennyp101 4y ago
  Yea, still a 2-300ms delay, which is why I guess a lot of devs just disable zoom - that way they get that "instant native app" feel without actually having to think about it :) Edit: Having just tried the sites in the Safari ... they zoom in just fine with that set, so .. Im a bit confused
- nicoburns 4y ago
  There's now a specific CSS property for this which I believes disables specifically double tap to zoom (while leaving pinch-to-zoom working).
- madhato 4y ago
  No longer needed. From https://webkit.org/blog/7367/new-interaction-behaviors-in-ios-10/ https://webkit.org/blog/7367/new-interaction-behaviors-in-io... 1. There must be a meta tag of type viewport 2. The viewport must be defined to have width=device-width 3. The content must be at a scale of 1
ivan888 4y ago
Can we edit the title to be "Please, stop disabling zoom" so that it doesn't look like this is about the Zoom product
- zachflower 4y ago
  Good catch. Fixed!
  - ekanes 4y ago
    It still absolutely sounds like the Zoom product. :) How about: "Please, stop preventing mobile users from using the zoom function"
- eganist 4y ago
  Would it be better to editorialize and say "Please, stop disabling pinch-to-zoom" instead? Or would that be too specific? I still thought it had to do with the Zoom product even with the case change.
zwieback 4y ago
Yes, please, I'm sad every time my 55+ year old eyes can't decipher something. Especially when I'm hands-free riding my bike on a sunny day.
nicbou 4y ago
Yes! I have good eyesight but still frequently zoom for various reasons. The main one is small images and diagrams on responsive websites. Another is clicking small clustered links. In the same vein, if you use images on your responsive website, consider linking to the full size version.
- imglorp 4y ago
  What's really weird is how some sites go out of their way to do this. IG for example, even on desktop, presents a fixed size image and prevents right-click operations on the image. Meanwhile, the full resolution image is actually available if you know how your browser works. Another example is video controls like scrub and speed being unavailable. I would buy this if they downscaled everything before storing it; that would actually make sense. But it seems like they just want to "curate" your "experience"?
  - kps 4y ago
    > prevents right-click operations In Firefox, Shift-right always presents the browser context menu. It's one of the few distinguishing features they haven't screwed up yet.
- tombert 4y ago
  I have decent eyesight post-LASIK, but I have a lot of trouble reading small text. I almost always read books in large-print if it's available, and the Kindle has been a godsend for this particular reason. I've been tested for dyslexia and I don't have it, I just have a weird brain that has trouble with small text. 95% of the time this is a complete non-issue for me, since my monitor (for home and work) is a 50" 4k TV and I just abuse the zoom-in feature in Firefox and I'm good, but when the site actively disables zooming, it feels like an almost directed attack towards people like me: Tombert need not read this website.
  - nicbou 4y ago
    Hey, this is an issue I'd like to work on. My eyesight is good but not as good as before, and it made me reconsider my font and contrast choices on allaboutberlin.com. I find myself zooming a lot more too. Can you tell me what you think of the font sizes? Is it readable enough? Is there room for improvement?
sph 4y ago
My pet theory: I'm pretty sure this is because when HTML5 became a thing, some major tech blog showed us what an HTML5 page would look like (simplified doctype, meta charset) and they included the viewport settings that disabled zoom. Then pretty much everyone copied from these guides, and here we are. I remember I had used HTML5 skeleton templates for a while before I learned that the "maximum-scale=1, user-scalable=no" they came with is not a good idea.
- _fat_santa 4y ago
  Almost all major template for JS frameworks these days include that line. And there are tons of guides that specify adding that in. I get why it's there, if you're building a PWA that is supposed to mimick a mobile app, you have to enable that to override some annoying mobile browser behaviors like zooming on an input. The problem is that the above scenario is about the only time you would want to set the viewport in that way. Yet because the line gets included in boilerplates to make it easier to make PWA's, it ends up in a ton of stuff that definitely is not a PWA and should not have that.
  - cnity 4y ago
    Interesting. I've seen the meta tag for the viewport for PWAs, but they don't usually prevent zooming. Most commonly I've seen: <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1"> Do you have links to examples of the major templates?
    - banana_giraffe 4y ago
      I assume it's something some "website builder" site like wix.com does. For instance, wix.com itself shows "user-scalable=no" in the viewport meta tag if your user-agent is from an iPhone.
  - lelandfe 4y ago
    Call me highly skeptical. I have not personally seen disabling zoom recommended in a very long time.
hello_io 4y ago
I’ve literally had to screenshot things so I could see them on my phone.
- dandigangi 4y ago
  So annoying to do that :|
rootusrootus 4y ago
100% agree. I'd like to be able to tell mobile Safari to just ignore that setting. Maybe there's a way and I missed it. Wouldn't be surprised, these old eyeballs aren't what they used to be and that exactly why I want zoom to always work. Some of us actually need it. Heck, back when I bought my mother her first iPad, this was the whole reason. She was getting eye surgery and wouldn't be able to see well, and would be stuck face-down for a couple weeks. I figured an iPad would be good, because she could pinch-zoom so the letters were two inches tall if necessary. It was a roaring success, but zoom=false defeats that.
- c-fe 4y ago
  Im on mobile safari on an iphone and i can zoom on all the pages where you are not supposed to zoom
- sorahn 4y ago
  > I'd like to be able to tell mobile Safari to just ignore that setting Mobile Safari does ignore this setting. You have to go out of your way with stopping touch events on mobile safari to prevent zooming. Sometimes this is problematic for sites using "small" (< 16px) fonts for input fields because that will cause mobile safari to zoom in to show the input field whether you want it to or not.
PaulHoule 4y ago
There's got to be some theory to balance aesthetics and readability. I used to get into terrible arguments with a business partner about every web page I made. He'd say "the text is too big" or "the text is too small" and I'd point out that you shouldn't ever complain about that because you can use Ctrl + and Ctrl -. I am thinking about UIs that work across desktop and mobile and would love to make peace with the scaling issues once and for all.
0des 4y ago
Sites that make the video port smaller when you zoom in... I hope you get whats coming to you.
- Enginerrrd 4y ago
  Oh my, yes...
madhato 4y ago
I once had a meeting were 3 coworkers and the CEO were all advocating for disabling zoom because, "other sites do it". I argued that it doesn't hurt anything to leave it enabled and refused to disable it. 3 months later Apple removed disabling zoom from Safari and I felt validated.
nonfamous 4y ago
FWIW, I can zoom on all of the listed example sites using the pinch action on an iPad. (My eyesight is poor, and this is something I do often to read small text.) Is this something that’s dependent on the browser?
- LegionMammal978 4y ago
  As this post mentions at the bottom, Safari ignores this and allows zoom on all websites, and Firefox and Chrome have opt-in settings to ignore this.
rhema 4y ago
My mother-in-law has severe eye problems and MS type symptoms. 16 years ago, I showed her how ctrl shift +/- could make her fonts huge. This one tip that is not obvious to most folks improved and continue to improve her quality of life _drastically_.
- mc4ndr3 4y ago
  Increase at OS level, instead of having to repeat this step manually for every app and website.
  - account42 4y ago
    These days, setting a higher DPI system-wide is the best solution. In 2006 it probably was not.
neya 4y ago
My first reaction was "Who in their right mind would ask users to stop disabling zoo..oh wait, you meant THAT zoom" :)) Had a chuckle.
- _fat_santa 4y ago
  HR: "Hey Santa can you please disable Zoom, don't want you getting distracted with meetings" Me: "ABSOLUTLEY!"
- GekkePrutser 4y ago
  We still block it at work due to the many security concerns with it. So I thought this too
alex3305 4y ago
Thank you! As a visually impaired user, disabling zoom is just incredibly stupid, except for a few edge cases such as games. As per theories in this thread why this meta tag is so popular. I know a few UX designers who explicitly asked the web developers (also me) to disable zoom so that there precious design could not be broken by users. I simply refuse to do so.
- Enginerrrd 4y ago
  >I simply refuse to do so. Doing God's work.
shahmeern 4y ago
I actually prefer it when sites have zoom disabled on mobile. It's very jarring having the entire viewport zoom in on input elements on focus.
- jhugo 4y ago
  minor inconvenience for you vs. completely unusable for others
- Mordisquitos 4y ago
  The simple solution for that would be for mobile browsers to provide an quick toggle to disable zoom.
  - account42 4y ago
    Or to just not have crappy autozoom on input elements in the first place.
julianlam 4y ago
We used to disable zoom, out of a sense of "our site doesn't need you to zoom", and partially because of cargo culting. Everybody just pasted the same meta tag everywhere. In the end, it's nobody's business but their own whether they zoom or not, so why would I disable it? We re-enabled zoom.
Ansil849 4y ago
I don't understand why the functionality exists for websites to dictate how users can and cannot view a page in the first place. This is like if you were reading a book that detected if you were trying to use a magnifying glass and immediately caused a glare to appear to prevent you from being able to read it. It is fucked up.
- detritus 4y ago
  You don't understand why someone would want to create something the way they want to, really? How much choice do you have in the typesetting of any book you've ever bought? You could still use a magnifying glass on your monitor, as some Russian General was photographed doing recently... . . Obviously I think the choice to disable zoom, etc, is daft, but ultimately that is the creator's right to call, advisedly or otherwise.
  - Ansil849 4y ago
    It is the creator's right to dictate the original presentation, but it is not the creator's right to dictate a user's behavior. Just like it is a filmmaker's right to set the default framerate and playback speed for a film, but you can rewind or fastforward, or play the film at X speed if you so wish in your media player. Disabling or otherwise inhibiting user behavior is not a creator's right.
    - detritus 4y ago
      Well, I don't believe it's not their right, but I am otherwise in agreement with you - it's daft to block such functionality. Ultimately, that's the creator's mistake to make and it's incumbent upon the end-user to read the content as they can, if they must. I'm not sure why people believe they have a right to dictate how someone else's content is created. I guess I'm more talking about individuals here, not organisations, but I think the problem lies more in individual's websites.
      - Ansil849 4y ago
Anaminus 4y ago
Vision: Game Boy Advance-sized website. Problem: Very tiny. Solution: Scale to viewport in integer increments. Result: https://anaminus.github.io/ https://anaminus.github.io/ This disables zoom. In fact, it actively fights the zoom level to always fit the viewport. Have I committed a great sin?
- Jaruzel 4y ago
  Love it. To be honest, It makes me recall painful WAP[1] browsing on an old Nokia phone. --- [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_Application_Protocol https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_Application_Protocol
- akavi 4y ago
  It's not scaled to the viewport for me. It's centered in the middle of it, but still tiny.
  - Anaminus 4y ago
    I figured this would happen. I've also committed the even greater sin of testing in only one environment (my own). I guess we don't quite live in the future yet.
- NDizzle 4y ago
  Not sure what you're going for, but this probably isn't it. https://imgur.com/a/Kgktbvs https://imgur.com/a/Kgktbvs
- account42 4y ago
  > This disables zoom. In fact, it actively fights the zoom level to always fit the viewport. Have I committed a great sin? Yes. Scaling to the screen size is fine, overriding the users's attempt at zooming in is not.
jhugo 4y ago
IMO, all browsers should ignore these attributes. The browser is a tool of the user, not the website designer.
lkxijlewlf 4y ago
No "please", just STOP.
coding123 4y ago
Browsers, please stop respecting this setting and allow zoom always.
err4nt 4y ago
It should be fairly straightforward (1 line of JavaScript required to actually get the job done) to make a user-script, or even a browser extension that obliterates any offending `<meta>` tag like this. Something like: document.querySelectorAll('meta[name="viewport"][content*="user-scalable=no"]').forEach(tag => tag.remove()) And if you wanted to get really fancy, you could use window.setInterval or a Mutation Observer to watch for any dynamically generated `<meta>` tags and continue to remove them forever if they every show up. While it's not ideal to have to use a snippet or an extension, you could fix this for yourself (or individual web users) in a way that 'fixed' literally every site on the internet for that person. So I wonder if that's a viable route to a solution!
- account42 4y ago
  Wouldn't this remove the meta tag entirely and thus completely disable responsive rendering on mobile browsers, reverting to emulating a larger viewport.
  - err4nt 4y ago
    This particular snippet would remove it entirely - if instead you had a default value you'd like to always apply to a tag if it's found, the code would be equivalently simple but just a little different.
tbranyen 4y ago
Totally agreed for mobile websites, with the exception for PWAs and mobile sites that rely on specific view ports being unchanged, like games for instance. With no scrollbars it's hard to tell if something is zoomed in or not and you might be missing parts of the UI without noticing. Native apps don't zoom and neither should mobile sites pretending to be apps. Build accessibility into the UI.
zajio1am 4y ago
There are plenty of evidently anti-user features like disabling zoom, disabling selection and so, i wonder why say Firefox even supports them.
agust 4y ago
What's the rational for not wanting websites and web apps to disable zoom, and not complaining about all native apps doing it? Would these people want to be able to zoom in native apps as well? Or is there a reason it's fine in native apps but not on the web?
- Semiapies 4y ago
  "Not being a concern troll."
- dr_kiszonka 4y ago
  I am not the author, but in native apps you can at least increase font size via system settings.
  - agust 4y ago
    Yes, so I think advocating for a general solution for websites and web apps to either be able to respect OS font size settings, or to provide users with the possibility to adjust font size would be preferable I think. There are very legitimate and valid reasons to disable page zooming: it can break layout, it can be triggered accidentally causing usability issues because content then overflows, and it is a poor solution to increase text readability as you often then have to scroll to read a full line of text. Not allowing to do it is not the solution.
- pjerem 4y ago
  You threw web apps and web sites in the same bucket. The problem is just that : websites are not apps and should be zoomed as you wish.
  - agust 4y ago
    And what distinguish them exactly...? And why would disabling zooming be fine for one but not the other?
    - pjerem 4y ago
Lifescape 4y ago
Thanks for including at the bottom of the article how to force your browser to enable zoom. Didn't know you could do this!
donarb 4y ago
iOS has a nice magnifying glass, accessible using a three-finger tap to bring up and dismiss. The little white button at the bottom of the glass allows you to change the zoom value.
endlessvoid94 4y ago
This is often boilerplate code for component libraries such as bootstrap or tailwind. So it's not always intentional exactly, but a prerequisite to using off-the-shelf UI code.
aikinai 4y ago
StopTheMadness[0] is a great Mobile Safari extension to help you take back control of your browser. It offers tons of great user-first overrides, but one of them is “Protect zoom.” It’s in the “Use with caution” section of the options, so I assume there are negative consequences though. After installing this, I’ve had a much better experience with the web on iPhone and iPad. And I less often have to switch to a laptop to get around some user-hostile site. [0] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/stopthemadness-mobile/id1583082931 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/stopthemadness-mobile/id158308...
sidcool 4y ago
TechCrunch does this on mobile and I hate it.
fitzroy 4y ago
Also sites where zooming in slightly causes the elements on the page to explode into layout-less CSS soup and then zooming back out puts you at a completely different location on the page.
mdb31 4y ago
I've never experienced any zoom problems (as opposed to Zoom problems...), and I just had a look at all the sites mentioned in TFA. In all cases, I can zoom all elements (text, images, the works) just fine, up to 500%. Firefox 100 on Windows. Is this just another one of those "Safari on IOS is broken, so the Web is broken" things, or is there more to it?
- qubitcoder 4y ago
  No, this is actually "Safari on iOS" isn't broken, and allows the user to remain in control (thankfully).
  - mdb31 4y ago
    I'm still confused. So, can you zoom any site on Safari on iOS or not? And if you can't, what definition of 'control' is that, again?
UltraViolence 4y ago
I have no problems using Ctrl+ on those sites with Firefox. What seems to be the problem?
- mmatuzo21 4y ago
  Mobile!
tifadg1 4y ago
yeah, I know a thing or two about zooming in, having set HN to 190%. On an unrelated note, why is HN text so small? I understand if it were a hunting site, where you're naturally supposed to use a scope, but for an IT forum that's unusual, given half of us wear glasses!
- jandrese 4y ago
  It's easily readable on my display, but I'm not using one of those fancy HiDPI displays. The bigger problem is when posts are printed with a 50% grey font on top of a 25% grey background. Like it's such an obvious usability issue that I have no idea why the developer who set it up didn't have a little laugh at their own expense for the mistake the first time they saw it and then immediately went back and fixed it. Why it it still like this in 2022?
  - tifadg1 4y ago
    not sure I qualify for hidpi - 1900x1200 on a 24". Also I never had issues regarding different shades. Hah just goes to show - hard to please everybody!
    - jandrese 4y ago
      1900x1200 on 24" is definitely not HiDPI. That's 93.625 PPI. HiDPI generally starts at 200 PPI and goes up from there.
evo_9 4y ago
Even more fun on Windows Outlook keeps uninstalling the Zoom calendar plugin and replacing it with Teams. Fucking Microsoft.
etaioinshrdlu 4y ago
My web app is in some sense a Figma-like design tool. It has built-in zoom functionality that conflicts with browser zoom. I have to disable zoom in order to make the app usable. iOS in particular is pretty hostile to this. There's another angle here, which is that being pro-browser zoom is anti-web application, and implicitly preferring native applications. This is actually playing into Apple's hands of enforcing their walled garden and the Apple tax. They are neutering web apps intentionally.
bluesmoon 4y ago
> I don't know whether this is a trend I posted this 11 years ago: https://tech.bluesmoon.info/2011/01/device-width-and-how-not-to-hate-your.html https://tech.bluesmoon.info/2011/01/device-width-and-how-not... It's not a trend, it's been around as long as it's been possible. Site owners dislike letting their users have control.
IE6 4y ago
Sort of related - I like the way ChromeOS handles gesture zoom - it just zooms in the screen so everything is enlarged including Chrome OS UI elements. Then the browser can do its own zooming and finally the OS has a zoom level. Best of all worlds IMHO.
gernb 4y ago
It's not just websites. Youtube Music's app uses too small of a font on iPad and changing the system font size under accessability doesn't change the font size in the app (well, it changes a few headlines but leaves everything thing else too small for my eyes) AND of course it doesn't support zoom because almost no native apps support zoom. (Why do they get a pass?)
soheil 4y ago
First I thought this is Zoom the video conf software; please, stop using easily misinterpreted wording. Then I realized on iOS since about 6 years ago disabling zoom via meta tags takes no effect and you can still zoom; please, stop being lazy and not do your research before complaining. Finally I realize on android and desktop this is still an issue but maybe those sites have valid reasons like they want the page look exactly as they intended for aesthetics or even in some cases functional reasons; please, stop assuming developers are just lazy and obviously want to annoy people with disabilities.
godot 4y ago
"width=device-width, initial-scale=1, user-scalable=no" seems like basically a setting that some tutorial had once posted many years ago, and all responsive sites just blindly took it as gospel; because it was supposed to give you one unified view for your site on mobile. Understandably, back in the days (and maybe still the case now) the default behavior for web browsers on mobile were to load the same desktop site but zoomed out -- it wasn't a great experience, so devs looked for a way to avoid it. I think it's fine to build a mobile responsive site with "width=device-width, initial-scale=1" (that gives you a default view that is built for mobile) but there is little reasons to have "user-scalable=no".
deleted 4y ago
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Sohcahtoa82 4y ago
Don't disable zoom, and stop fucking with scrolling. Browser scrolling works fine. You don't need to try to re-implement smooth scrolling, it never works and makes my scrolling bounce around like mad. One website override my scrolling speed entirely. I like it so that 1 click = 2 lines of scrolling. That site changed it to that 1 click = 1/2 line, but for some reason the web dev thought they knew better than my preferences.
- commandlinefan 4y ago
  It drives me crazy when I try to scroll up to re-read something and the header pops up and covers what I was trying to scroll to.
greggman3 4y ago
I don't disable zoom but I'm sympathetic that mobile browsers SUCK at it. here's a very simple SPA like page https://decisive-spiral-blue.glitch.me https://decisive-spiral-blue.glitch.me It's just an upper and lower vertical flexbox. fixed size toolbar on top, the rest is a textarea. Click in the text area. type "A"<enter>, "B"<enter>, "C"<enter> etc... and watch the cursor disappear below the virtual keyboard. WTF! I've seen other issues where the browser auto-zooms when clicking in a textarea and while they are trying to be helpful they actually make the site practically unusable. Both because info the user needed is now offscreen and because finishing the input doesn't auto-unzoom so the user is left having to manually adjust to see the page again. And then, there are random rules (like if the text is larger than 16px it might not auto-zoom). Might. AFAIK there is no spec that says "hey, don't auto-zoom" so your left with random hacks to try to make the site usable. (of course if the user wants to zoom that's fine) The point is, the mobile browsing experience sucks by default and devs do the best they can to try to work around how much it sucks. They choose wrong but they wouldn't be reaching for solutions if the default experience wasn't so bad in the first place. I'd personally like to be able to opt in to a mode where when the virtual keyboard appears the browser's size changes and I can fix my layout for the new available size via CSS media queries.
tshaddox 4y ago
Apple gets a lot of criticism for its alleged hostility towards developers. I agree with some of that criticism! But this is a perfect example of Apple taking the side of the user when developers are hostile towards users. I’ve only used iPhones for years and I didn’t even realize this was still a problem for smartphone users!
- manderley 4y ago
  You can force-enable zoom in pretty much all browsers, it's part of the accessibility settings. You don't need an Iphone.
  - Handytinge 4y ago
    No, but the point was that they didn't even realise the issue existed, as iOS has this as a default behaviour. Reading the article I was surprised to hear of the issue and could not replicate. I am capable of finding the relevant setting in Android I'm sure, but many older and tech illiterate people in my life (who are more likely to need zoom) I think would struggle.
NDizzle 4y ago
I just changed the daily life of one of my mechanics. They use Napa Parts Trails (or something along those lines) and when he clicked into something, it pops up a tab without any controls and they had no idea how to adjust the text size. Because it removes all the controls. New laptop, super high DPI, super tiny characters in a shop environment. I taught him the nearly universal ctrl mouse wheel hotkey combo so that he can scale things, and then proceeded to adjust about a half dozen different areas in the various applications he uses for managing jobs and ordering parts.
dandigangi 4y ago
Wild that people argue against a11y and usability. I'm sure there is some cases where it doesn't matter but for the rest, hard requirement. At DocuSign it would put us out of compliance if I'm not mistaken.
nathias 4y ago
> This can have serious negative consequences for people with low vision, elderly people and pretty much anyone who has to or wants to zoom in. I disable it because there are bugs on mobile browsers where inputs can automatically hijack zoom and the default behavior really messes up the workflow. But yea you have to reimplement or replace it with a flow for your use case.
humanwhosits 4y ago
Why does the web browser allow this?
knorker 4y ago
Also stop messing with scroll. Absolutely everything that isn't default browser zoom is broken. It's the wrong speed, or cuts at the wrong place. Basically it's always surprising in an annoying way. Then there's the "frustratingly slow scroll to navigate". E.g. go to https://cloud.google.com/compute/all-pricing https://cloud.google.com/compute/all-pricing and click on the last nav on the left.
mamoriamohit 4y ago
It's specially painful when the zoom is disabled, and then a pop up comes up with a teeny tiny X close button. I agree I have fat fingers but 8 our of 10 times, I end up opening up the ad. :(
revskill 4y ago
Lol, i thought this is the video streaming software Zoom.
culturedsystems 4y ago
"Safari seems to ignore maximum-scale=1 and user-scalable=no" This is somewhat ironic because, if memory serves, the original reason people started adding this to their HTML was because of some dubious scaling behaviour on iOS Safari (I think, if you didn't disable zooming, Safari responded to rotation by zooming the page to fill the new width, rather than laying out the page again).
elipsey 4y ago
>As a user, you can force allow zooming: >In Firefox find the settings, select “Accessibility” and activate “Zoom on all website” >In Chrome find the settings, select “Accessibility” and check “Force enable zoom” OMFG, thank you.
emptyparadise 4y ago
I love websites which also set element scaling using vw and vh in addition to the tricks described in the article, meaning that not only pinch-zoom doesn't work, even the good old ctrl-scroll does nothing. It gets even funnier if your screen size is larger than a MacBook's.
mensetmanusman 4y ago
I hate websites that don’t allow zoom, I have to screenshot and zoom on that…
egberts1 4y ago
As a disabled person, I totally recoiled and revulsed at the OP’s audacity and emboldeness to demand how other should behave toward him. I would never pull someone down to sit down to my eye level if in a wheelchair, never. I would never pull someone closer to me so I can read lips better. And certainly I would never remotely pull them to something that I want, as in this case, digital remote camera. However, it is a courtesy to ask them to adjust for your sake. And only a courtesy. This OP dude needs a proverbial slap across the face. Just ask, curtly and nicely.
- zachflower 4y ago
  I'm so sorry, I'm not 100% sure I understand this comment. Would you mind explaining what you mean by asking others to adjust for your sake in the context of mobile web accessibility? I'm having trouble connecting it to the content of the article. I'm not the writer, but would love to better understand your point of view here.
  - egberts1 4y ago
    Ah, remote zooming is being given in a different context. I had thought it was about allowing other people to play with the gimbal and focus and that kind of “zoom” … of a remote camera variety. My bad. Still, asking others to adjust is a nice thing. Demanding to do things on their end, not so much.
    - zachflower 4y ago
      Ah, I see. Thanks for clarifying!
efitz 4y ago
If we want a free and open internet, why is the current web designed to let server owners control our experience? This leads to accessibility fails like the inability for visually challenged people to control font size or contrast, but also leads to lots of other bad effects, like the fact that my browser gets more and more bloated every year and essentially has become a tool to let other people run programs (javascript and wasm) on my computer, and display content that they want (ads, etc.) rather than content that I want. I really want an internet where servers provide structured content, but where I control my user experience.
- krapp 4y ago
  >If we want a free and open internet, why is the current web designed to let server owners control our experience? Because server owners have the freedom to publish whatever they like (within the bounds of the law) and design their sites however they wish. An internet on which servers are only allowed to provide "structured content" would be significantly less free and open. You may be interested in the Gemini Protocol[0], on which sites are built according to that general principle. [0]https://gemini.circumlunar.space/ https://gemini.circumlunar.space/
  - barnabee 4y ago
    They can send whatever data they like but they have no right of control over what I do with it or how it’s rendered. Browsers would be better if they prioritised user preferences over website designers.
    - krapp 4y ago
      >Browsers would be better if they prioritised user preferences over website designers. The vast majority of users would prefer not to have to write an entire layout and stylesheet for each site they visit, nor would they consider having all sites conform to a single layout or style to be of any value. It's only very small minority of people (probably exclusive to HN) who would prefer the web was nothing more than JSON or raw bitstreams. But again - geminispace works the way you want. Gemtext doesn't use stylesheets and only has very basic markup. Everything is dictated and controlled by the browser. And the protocol is specifically designed such that writing a client for it is easy.
hedora 4y ago
Ironically, the custom styling on the code snippets prevents them from fitting on my screen at any zoom level.
noveltyaccount 4y ago
1000% agree, one of my biggest pet peeves. Glad the article shares the (user-side) solution: force enable zoom in accessibility. One of my other pet peeves is web sites that shrink the default text size. Why??? I set my browser and OS to a text size that is useable for me, please defer to me, your user. Thanks muchly.
realstacktrace 4y ago
Who else read "zoom" and thought "Zoom"?
- hedora 4y ago
  As, in "what does it mean to disable it, and how do I?" Some corporate training long ago had "I can't see videos" and "I can't hear things" toggles that were not mutually exclusive. If you set it to "Hellen Keller mode", you could just read the training at your own pace. It was glorious. Thank you, accessiblity advocates!
r00fus 4y ago
I have setup for myself and my parents that all mobile Safari sites automatically go to reader mode. Reader mode does not prevent zoom, copying, etc. It's just one click to remove it for form-based websites (a few steps to whitelist if you're going to use that web form a lot), but the readability for the vast majority of websites is drastically improved.
neoCrimeLabs 4y ago
Rather than trying to convince web developers, how possible is this to get the feature depreciated in browsers?
neoyagami 4y ago
Oh god. this, yes please, I got a mild sight disability and the zoom helps doing my work fast, the amount of times zoom was disabled it was just awfull, and in some cases parts of the site (ex: big tables) cannot be read properly.
teilo 4y ago
Current versions of Chrome do not even have an Accessibility section. The referenced setting is nowhere to be found.
arbol 4y ago
Great tips. I've now enabled zoom in my accessibility settings in Brave. I've often been annoyed by lack of zoom
es7 4y ago
If you leave zoom enabled on mobile, then the browser tries to handle double-tap-to-zoom, which adds a surprisingly large delay to all taps while it waits to see if there is a second tap coming. This makes websites feel sluggish and unresponsive. Is there a good way to get lightning-fast response times to tap events without disabling zoom in 2022?
- aeternum 4y ago
  Yes, this is really why most mobile sites disable it (at least it's the primary reason I do). Latency matters a lot and everyone taps, not everyone zooms.
- eyelidlessness 4y ago
  CSS one liner: a, button, .etc { touch-action: manipulation; }
bdeshi 4y ago
another annoyance is links that open in new tabs. if i want to open a link in a new tab, i can do it myself, websites don't have to decide for me.
login01 4y ago
Could you add the watts, voltage & amperage, to each of the standards? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB. USB Power Delivery Rev. 1.0 (V. 1.0) 2012-07-05 100 W (20 V, 5 A) USB Power Delivery Rev. 1.0 (V. 1.3) 2014-03-11 100 W (20 V, 5 A) USB Power Delivery Rev. 2.0 (V. 1.0) 2014-08-11 100 W (20 V, 5 A) USB Power Delivery Rev. 2.0 (V. 1.1) 2015-05-07 100 W (20 V, 5 A) USB Power Delivery Rev. 2.0 (V. 1.2) 2016-03-25 100 W (20 V, 5 A) USB Power Delivery Rev. 2.0 (V. 1.3) 2017-01-12 100 W (20 V, 5 A) USB Power Delivery Rev. 3.0 (V. 1.1) 2017-01-12 100 W (20 V, 5 A) USB Power Delivery Rev. 3.0 (V. 1.2) 2018-06-21 100 W (20 V, 5 A) USB Power Delivery Rev. 3.0 (V. 2.0) 2019-08-29 100 W (20 V, 5 A) USB Power Delivery Rev. 3.1 (V. 1.0) 2021-05-24 240 W (48 V, 5 A) USB Power Delivery Rev. 3.1 (V. 1.1) 2021-07-06 240 W (48 V, 5 A) USB Power Delivery Rev. 3.1 (V. 1.2) 2021-10-26 240 W (48 V, 5 A)
- lsaferite 4y ago
  I feel like this comment is on the wrong thread maybe?
happythebob 4y ago
Oof, an article about accessibility with a headline using the term "disabling." I'm otherwise with the article, and also for old IT updating their terms.
bhdzllr 4y ago
Maybe a lot of people did this to prevent Safari on iPhone to zoom in when an input field gets focus. But if I remember correctly the correct way to prevent this was to set the font-size of the input field to at least 16px. EDIT: More infos: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2989263/disable-auto-zoom-in-input-text-tag-safari-on-iphone https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2989263/disable-auto-zoo...
synthecypher 4y ago
Not sure why this became a trend my guess is back when everyone was trying to update their website to support mobile devices, they want to deliver an 'app-like' experience and as native apps don't let you pinch zoom the native UI wherever you like and mobile sites followed suit. I guess the issue now is it has become part of the cargo cult with people including these meta tags in their base templates without knowing what it does and failing to implement a suitable layout for all mobile device screen sizes and DPIs. https://github.com/h5bp/html5-boilerplate/blob/main/src/index.html#L8 https://github.com/h5bp/html5-boilerplate/blob/main/src/inde...

620 points by zachflower 4y ago

While we are at it: please stop changing the right mouse button in my browser. I‘m looking at you MS Teams. If you want to have context menus in your app, that’s ok, but please don’t put them in the browser. You break important use cases for me and other people.

jeroenhd 4y ago
Firefox has an override for that, shift+right mouse should ignore the click handlers and show the browser context menu. This is something I really miss in other browsers, especially the ones that decide that they know better than me about how things like copy/paste are supposed to work.
- tomcatfish 4y ago
  I have never heard this before. Is there more stuff like this? Note: I can't test this right now because I don't have any sites that do this particular bad thing
  - jeroenhd 4y ago
    This website [1] (actually, its codepen [2]) has a demo and even describes all the user-hostile reasons why developers might want to disable the right click menu. There are some other accessibility tricks that Firefox advertises [3] like ignoring website font and color choices. Firefox also has native support for overriding website CSS [5] but "modern" websites often come with impossible to understand DOM and CSS structures (if they even use CSS and not just forcefully insert style into the DOM directly because separation of concerns is for losers I guess). Then there are websites like Github and some shitty forum software that insist on hijacking keyboard shortcuts like Ctrl+F and Ctrl+K. You can go into about:config and set permissions.default.shortcuts to 2 (Services.perms.DENY_ACTION) to block websites from overriding shortcut settings by default. You can go into the site settings and manually enable them again by going to page info (ctrl+i), then tabbing over to permissions, and changing the value for "override keyboard shortcuts" from "default" to "allow". Or, you could simply block the websites that offend you from that screen without changing the default. [1]: https://www.codeinwp.com/snippets/disable-right-click-context-menu/ https://www.codeinwp.com/snippets/disable-right-click-contex... [2]: https://codepen.io/impressivewebs/embed/zYYxepW?height=265&theme-id=0&default-tab=result#result-box https://codepen.io/impressivewebs/embed/zYYxepW?height=265&t... [3]: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/accessibility-features-firefox-make-firefox-and-we https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/accessibility-features-... [4]: https://superuser.com/questions/318912/how-can-i-override-the-css-of-a-site-in-firefox-with-usercontent-css https://superuser.com/questions/318912/how-can-i-override-th...

timtas 4y ago

If I can't zoom in on photos, the site is broken.

moffkalast 4y ago

shreshthmohan 4y ago
A great way to annoy a big chunk of your site's users too. Classic dig own grave.

amluto 4y ago

It’s not just accessibility. I’ve last track of the number of times I’ve seen a mobile website with a table that extends past the right side of the viewport and zoom disabled. You can’t scroll, and you can’t zoom, so you can’t read the table.

Reason077 4y ago
What mobile browser? On iOS Safari, all the example websites mentioned by the OP allowed me to zoom. I guess Safari doesn’t allow zoom to be disabled by websites? Maybe all browsers should work this way?
- Saint_Genet 4y ago
  It says so in the article
- rectang 4y ago
  I use iOS Firefox, because I love desktop Firefox and I have Firefo set up with account sync across all my devices. But there's a feature of desktop Firefox which isn't available on the iOS version: remember zoom setting for a domain. iOS Firefox does have pinch-to-zoom, but having to use it every time I navigate to a page is tiresome. iOS Firefox is a small niche choice and not the same codebase as desktop Firefox because Apple requires that you use their rendering engine. So I'm not sure it makes sense for Mozilla to dedicate the kind of resources to it to implement all the features I might want, and I don't have a lot of gripes. But as a datapoint in this thread, zoom is really important to me, and I miss it when it's not available. I shake my head every time I visit Google search results on my iPad because the text is so tiny.
- bradlys 4y ago
  I've had this happen on iOS Safari. It happens everywhere.
  - Reason077 4y ago
    Weird. I don’t see this, or maybe I’m misunderstanding the problem. Do you have an example site?

renewiltord 4y ago

Looks like a user agent concern.

emteycz 4y ago
No. Sometimes it's good to disable zoom (e. g. in web apps that function as a big canvas, like Figma). Pages should use the feature correctly. People shouldn't have to fiddle with browser settings just because someone can't CSS properly.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- bartread 4y ago
  I think this is where I have to point out that 50% of people who CSS are worse than average at CSS, depending upon exactly how you define "average". You're absolutely right: pages should use the feature correctly, but some won't (because of my previous point or, much less frequently, out of sheer stubbornness/malice/whatever), so I'm extremely glad that browsers offer a workaround via settings for situations where that's the case.
- _moof 4y ago
  If there's one thing that's true about web design, it's that pages won't use the feature correctly, no matter what the feature is.
- runnerup 4y ago
  I agree with the grandparent. While I believe it’s irresponsible for web developers to inappropriately lock zoom…I also believe it’s grossly irresponsible for the browser to not provide an override for this. One of the worst offenses for me is when the website dynamically resizes everything so that zoom “works” but a split second later everything goes back the way it was. I would also like browsers to have a quick/accessible workaround for that behavior too.
- jhugo 4y ago
  The user is zooming because what they see is not legible to them. If Figma can't work out how to handle that, that's Figma's failing.

hallway_monitor 4y ago

Yes it is silly. The article actually ends with some useful tips: As a user, you can force allow zooming: In Firefox find the settings, select “Accessibility” and activate “Zoom on all website” In Chrome find the settings, select “Accessibility” and check “Force enable zoom”

kevincox 4y ago
Unfortunately this also disables it on sites where it makes sense. For example I have a simple tool to pick a random person or split people into groups https://playerone.kevincox.ca/ https://playerone.kevincox.ca/ Without zoom disabled 5 people putting their fingers on a screen looks a lot like a pinch gesture. Disabling the default event handlers only works some of the time. This is a common problem with the web, we can't have nice things because people use them poorly.
- pvorb 4y ago
  That tool is a gem! I didn't have many situations where I could have used this during the past two years, but things seem to become a little better now.
  - kevincox 4y ago
    Thanks for the kind words. The same for me, I used to use this at least weekly, but now I'm lucky if I open it in a month (although regular board games are coming back to my life). Pro tip: Double tap for a few more options.
- iggldiggl 4y ago
  Yep, exactly this. I have that setting enabled myself due to e.g. Blogspot inappropriately blocking zoom in its default mobile template — but on the other hand it does unfortunately mean that e.g. on openstreetmap.org I occasionally end up zooming the page instead of zooming the map…
- fold3 4y ago
  For whats it's worth, I'm trying to test the issue on your website with either chromium or Firefox on android 12 and it doesn't zoom.

chunkyks 4y ago

But then the website might not look like the designer's glistening perfect vision, that only ever worked properly in their browser on their desktop in the first place.

MrBuddyCasino 4y ago
The reason this is done is to get rid of extra latency when processing user input. I guess detecting zoom gestures needs some time to distinguish them from normal clicks?
- _jal 4y ago
  I wonder if it helps them detect when I leave and go search for something that works.
- chunkyks 4y ago
  Presuming you are correct: * Some number of people are sensitive to latency * Some people are unable to read my website You're gambling that there are more people who would walk away due to latency, than there are who would walk away due to being unable to interact with your site at all. Personally I suspect that to be a poor tradeoff.
  - iamsaitam 4y ago
    Everyone will be affected by the latency vs a few will be affected by the lack of accessibility. This is what your tradeoff is.

electroly 4y ago

In the old days you needed to disable zoom in order to get click events immediately, rather than delayed a bit so it can tell whether it's really going to be a zoom operation. Is that still true?

bennyp101 4y ago
Yea, still a 2-300ms delay, which is why I guess a lot of devs just disable zoom - that way they get that "instant native app" feel without actually having to think about it :) Edit: Having just tried the sites in the Safari ... they zoom in just fine with that set, so .. Im a bit confused
nicoburns 4y ago
There's now a specific CSS property for this which I believes disables specifically double tap to zoom (while leaving pinch-to-zoom working).
madhato 4y ago
No longer needed. From https://webkit.org/blog/7367/new-interaction-behaviors-in-ios-10/ https://webkit.org/blog/7367/new-interaction-behaviors-in-io... 1. There must be a meta tag of type viewport 2. The viewport must be defined to have width=device-width 3. The content must be at a scale of 1

ivan888 4y ago

Can we edit the title to be "Please, stop disabling zoom" so that it doesn't look like this is about the Zoom product

zachflower 4y ago
Good catch. Fixed!
- ekanes 4y ago
  It still absolutely sounds like the Zoom product. :) How about: "Please, stop preventing mobile users from using the zoom function"
eganist 4y ago
Would it be better to editorialize and say "Please, stop disabling pinch-to-zoom" instead? Or would that be too specific? I still thought it had to do with the Zoom product even with the case change.

zwieback 4y ago

Yes, please, I'm sad every time my 55+ year old eyes can't decipher something. Especially when I'm hands-free riding my bike on a sunny day.

nicbou 4y ago

Yes! I have good eyesight but still frequently zoom for various reasons. The main one is small images and diagrams on responsive websites. Another is clicking small clustered links. In the same vein, if you use images on your responsive website, consider linking to the full size version.

imglorp 4y ago
What's really weird is how some sites go out of their way to do this. IG for example, even on desktop, presents a fixed size image and prevents right-click operations on the image. Meanwhile, the full resolution image is actually available if you know how your browser works. Another example is video controls like scrub and speed being unavailable. I would buy this if they downscaled everything before storing it; that would actually make sense. But it seems like they just want to "curate" your "experience"?
- kps 4y ago
  > prevents right-click operations In Firefox, Shift-right always presents the browser context menu. It's one of the few distinguishing features they haven't screwed up yet.
tombert 4y ago
I have decent eyesight post-LASIK, but I have a lot of trouble reading small text. I almost always read books in large-print if it's available, and the Kindle has been a godsend for this particular reason. I've been tested for dyslexia and I don't have it, I just have a weird brain that has trouble with small text. 95% of the time this is a complete non-issue for me, since my monitor (for home and work) is a 50" 4k TV and I just abuse the zoom-in feature in Firefox and I'm good, but when the site actively disables zooming, it feels like an almost directed attack towards people like me: Tombert need not read this website.
- nicbou 4y ago
  Hey, this is an issue I'd like to work on. My eyesight is good but not as good as before, and it made me reconsider my font and contrast choices on allaboutberlin.com. I find myself zooming a lot more too. Can you tell me what you think of the font sizes? Is it readable enough? Is there room for improvement?

sph 4y ago

My pet theory: I'm pretty sure this is because when HTML5 became a thing, some major tech blog showed us what an HTML5 page would look like (simplified doctype, meta charset) and they included the viewport settings that disabled zoom. Then pretty much everyone copied from these guides, and here we are. I remember I had used HTML5 skeleton templates for a while before I learned that the "maximum-scale=1, user-scalable=no" they came with is not a good idea.

_fat_santa 4y ago
Almost all major template for JS frameworks these days include that line. And there are tons of guides that specify adding that in. I get why it's there, if you're building a PWA that is supposed to mimick a mobile app, you have to enable that to override some annoying mobile browser behaviors like zooming on an input. The problem is that the above scenario is about the only time you would want to set the viewport in that way. Yet because the line gets included in boilerplates to make it easier to make PWA's, it ends up in a ton of stuff that definitely is not a PWA and should not have that.
- cnity 4y ago
  Interesting. I've seen the meta tag for the viewport for PWAs, but they don't usually prevent zooming. Most commonly I've seen: <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1"> Do you have links to examples of the major templates?
  - banana_giraffe 4y ago
    I assume it's something some "website builder" site like wix.com does. For instance, wix.com itself shows "user-scalable=no" in the viewport meta tag if your user-agent is from an iPhone.
- lelandfe 4y ago
  Call me highly skeptical. I have not personally seen disabling zoom recommended in a very long time.

hello_io 4y ago

I’ve literally had to screenshot things so I could see them on my phone.

dandigangi 4y ago
So annoying to do that :|

rootusrootus 4y ago

100% agree. I'd like to be able to tell mobile Safari to just ignore that setting. Maybe there's a way and I missed it. Wouldn't be surprised, these old eyeballs aren't what they used to be and that exactly why I want zoom to always work. Some of us actually need it. Heck, back when I bought my mother her first iPad, this was the whole reason. She was getting eye surgery and wouldn't be able to see well, and would be stuck face-down for a couple weeks. I figured an iPad would be good, because she could pinch-zoom so the letters were two inches tall if necessary. It was a roaring success, but zoom=false defeats that.

c-fe 4y ago
Im on mobile safari on an iphone and i can zoom on all the pages where you are not supposed to zoom
sorahn 4y ago
> I'd like to be able to tell mobile Safari to just ignore that setting Mobile Safari does ignore this setting. You have to go out of your way with stopping touch events on mobile safari to prevent zooming. Sometimes this is problematic for sites using "small" (< 16px) fonts for input fields because that will cause mobile safari to zoom in to show the input field whether you want it to or not.

PaulHoule 4y ago

There's got to be some theory to balance aesthetics and readability. I used to get into terrible arguments with a business partner about every web page I made. He'd say "the text is too big" or "the text is too small" and I'd point out that you shouldn't ever complain about that because you can use Ctrl + and Ctrl -. I am thinking about UIs that work across desktop and mobile and would love to make peace with the scaling issues once and for all.

0des 4y ago

Sites that make the video port smaller when you zoom in... I hope you get whats coming to you.

Enginerrrd 4y ago
Oh my, yes...

madhato 4y ago

I once had a meeting were 3 coworkers and the CEO were all advocating for disabling zoom because, "other sites do it". I argued that it doesn't hurt anything to leave it enabled and refused to disable it. 3 months later Apple removed disabling zoom from Safari and I felt validated.

nonfamous 4y ago

FWIW, I can zoom on all of the listed example sites using the pinch action on an iPad. (My eyesight is poor, and this is something I do often to read small text.) Is this something that’s dependent on the browser?

LegionMammal978 4y ago
As this post mentions at the bottom, Safari ignores this and allows zoom on all websites, and Firefox and Chrome have opt-in settings to ignore this.

rhema 4y ago

My mother-in-law has severe eye problems and MS type symptoms. 16 years ago, I showed her how ctrl shift +/- could make her fonts huge. This one tip that is not obvious to most folks improved and continue to improve her quality of life _drastically_.

mc4ndr3 4y ago
Increase at OS level, instead of having to repeat this step manually for every app and website.
- account42 4y ago
  These days, setting a higher DPI system-wide is the best solution. In 2006 it probably was not.

neya 4y ago

My first reaction was "Who in their right mind would ask users to stop disabling zoo..oh wait, you meant THAT zoom" :)) Had a chuckle.

_fat_santa 4y ago
HR: "Hey Santa can you please disable Zoom, don't want you getting distracted with meetings" Me: "ABSOLUTLEY!"
GekkePrutser 4y ago
We still block it at work due to the many security concerns with it. So I thought this too

alex3305 4y ago

Thank you! As a visually impaired user, disabling zoom is just incredibly stupid, except for a few edge cases such as games. As per theories in this thread why this meta tag is so popular. I know a few UX designers who explicitly asked the web developers (also me) to disable zoom so that there precious design could not be broken by users. I simply refuse to do so.

Enginerrrd 4y ago
>I simply refuse to do so. Doing God's work.

shahmeern 4y ago

I actually prefer it when sites have zoom disabled on mobile. It's very jarring having the entire viewport zoom in on input elements on focus.

jhugo 4y ago
minor inconvenience for you vs. completely unusable for others
Mordisquitos 4y ago
The simple solution for that would be for mobile browsers to provide an quick toggle to disable zoom.
- account42 4y ago
  Or to just not have crappy autozoom on input elements in the first place.

julianlam 4y ago

We used to disable zoom, out of a sense of "our site doesn't need you to zoom", and partially because of cargo culting. Everybody just pasted the same meta tag everywhere. In the end, it's nobody's business but their own whether they zoom or not, so why would I disable it? We re-enabled zoom.

Ansil849 4y ago

I don't understand why the functionality exists for websites to dictate how users can and cannot view a page in the first place. This is like if you were reading a book that detected if you were trying to use a magnifying glass and immediately caused a glare to appear to prevent you from being able to read it. It is fucked up.

detritus 4y ago
You don't understand why someone would want to create something the way they want to, really? How much choice do you have in the typesetting of any book you've ever bought? You could still use a magnifying glass on your monitor, as some Russian General was photographed doing recently... . . Obviously I think the choice to disable zoom, etc, is daft, but ultimately that is the creator's right to call, advisedly or otherwise.
- Ansil849 4y ago
  It is the creator's right to dictate the original presentation, but it is not the creator's right to dictate a user's behavior. Just like it is a filmmaker's right to set the default framerate and playback speed for a film, but you can rewind or fastforward, or play the film at X speed if you so wish in your media player. Disabling or otherwise inhibiting user behavior is not a creator's right.
  - detritus 4y ago
    Well, I don't believe it's not their right, but I am otherwise in agreement with you - it's daft to block such functionality. Ultimately, that's the creator's mistake to make and it's incumbent upon the end-user to read the content as they can, if they must. I'm not sure why people believe they have a right to dictate how someone else's content is created. I guess I'm more talking about individuals here, not organisations, but I think the problem lies more in individual's websites.
    - Ansil849 4y ago

Anaminus 4y ago

Vision: Game Boy Advance-sized website. Problem: Very tiny. Solution: Scale to viewport in integer increments. Result: https://anaminus.github.io/ https://anaminus.github.io/ This disables zoom. In fact, it actively fights the zoom level to always fit the viewport. Have I committed a great sin?

Jaruzel 4y ago
Love it. To be honest, It makes me recall painful WAP[1] browsing on an old Nokia phone. --- [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_Application_Protocol https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_Application_Protocol
akavi 4y ago
It's not scaled to the viewport for me. It's centered in the middle of it, but still tiny.
- Anaminus 4y ago
  I figured this would happen. I've also committed the even greater sin of testing in only one environment (my own). I guess we don't quite live in the future yet.
NDizzle 4y ago
Not sure what you're going for, but this probably isn't it. https://imgur.com/a/Kgktbvs https://imgur.com/a/Kgktbvs
account42 4y ago
> This disables zoom. In fact, it actively fights the zoom level to always fit the viewport. Have I committed a great sin? Yes. Scaling to the screen size is fine, overriding the users's attempt at zooming in is not.

jhugo 4y ago

IMO, all browsers should ignore these attributes. The browser is a tool of the user, not the website designer.

lkxijlewlf 4y ago

No "please", just STOP.

coding123 4y ago

Browsers, please stop respecting this setting and allow zoom always.

err4nt 4y ago

It should be fairly straightforward (1 line of JavaScript required to actually get the job done) to make a user-script, or even a browser extension that obliterates any offending `<meta>` tag like this. Something like: document.querySelectorAll('meta[name="viewport"][content*="user-scalable=no"]').forEach(tag => tag.remove()) And if you wanted to get really fancy, you could use window.setInterval or a Mutation Observer to watch for any dynamically generated `<meta>` tags and continue to remove them forever if they every show up. While it's not ideal to have to use a snippet or an extension, you could fix this for yourself (or individual web users) in a way that 'fixed' literally every site on the internet for that person. So I wonder if that's a viable route to a solution!

account42 4y ago
Wouldn't this remove the meta tag entirely and thus completely disable responsive rendering on mobile browsers, reverting to emulating a larger viewport.
- err4nt 4y ago
  This particular snippet would remove it entirely - if instead you had a default value you'd like to always apply to a tag if it's found, the code would be equivalently simple but just a little different.

tbranyen 4y ago

Totally agreed for mobile websites, with the exception for PWAs and mobile sites that rely on specific view ports being unchanged, like games for instance. With no scrollbars it's hard to tell if something is zoomed in or not and you might be missing parts of the UI without noticing. Native apps don't zoom and neither should mobile sites pretending to be apps. Build accessibility into the UI.

zajio1am 4y ago

There are plenty of evidently anti-user features like disabling zoom, disabling selection and so, i wonder why say Firefox even supports them.

agust 4y ago

What's the rational for not wanting websites and web apps to disable zoom, and not complaining about all native apps doing it? Would these people want to be able to zoom in native apps as well? Or is there a reason it's fine in native apps but not on the web?

Semiapies 4y ago
"Not being a concern troll."
dr_kiszonka 4y ago
I am not the author, but in native apps you can at least increase font size via system settings.
- agust 4y ago
  Yes, so I think advocating for a general solution for websites and web apps to either be able to respect OS font size settings, or to provide users with the possibility to adjust font size would be preferable I think. There are very legitimate and valid reasons to disable page zooming: it can break layout, it can be triggered accidentally causing usability issues because content then overflows, and it is a poor solution to increase text readability as you often then have to scroll to read a full line of text. Not allowing to do it is not the solution.
pjerem 4y ago
You threw web apps and web sites in the same bucket. The problem is just that : websites are not apps and should be zoomed as you wish.
- agust 4y ago
  And what distinguish them exactly...? And why would disabling zooming be fine for one but not the other?
  - pjerem 4y ago

Lifescape 4y ago

Thanks for including at the bottom of the article how to force your browser to enable zoom. Didn't know you could do this!

donarb 4y ago

iOS has a nice magnifying glass, accessible using a three-finger tap to bring up and dismiss. The little white button at the bottom of the glass allows you to change the zoom value.

endlessvoid94 4y ago

This is often boilerplate code for component libraries such as bootstrap or tailwind. So it's not always intentional exactly, but a prerequisite to using off-the-shelf UI code.

aikinai 4y ago

StopTheMadness[0] is a great Mobile Safari extension to help you take back control of your browser. It offers tons of great user-first overrides, but one of them is “Protect zoom.” It’s in the “Use with caution” section of the options, so I assume there are negative consequences though. After installing this, I’ve had a much better experience with the web on iPhone and iPad. And I less often have to switch to a laptop to get around some user-hostile site. [0] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/stopthemadness-mobile/id1583082931 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/stopthemadness-mobile/id158308...

sidcool 4y ago

TechCrunch does this on mobile and I hate it.

fitzroy 4y ago

Also sites where zooming in slightly causes the elements on the page to explode into layout-less CSS soup and then zooming back out puts you at a completely different location on the page.

mdb31 4y ago

I've never experienced any zoom problems (as opposed to Zoom problems...), and I just had a look at all the sites mentioned in TFA. In all cases, I can zoom all elements (text, images, the works) just fine, up to 500%. Firefox 100 on Windows. Is this just another one of those "Safari on IOS is broken, so the Web is broken" things, or is there more to it?

qubitcoder 4y ago
No, this is actually "Safari on iOS" isn't broken, and allows the user to remain in control (thankfully).
- mdb31 4y ago
  I'm still confused. So, can you zoom any site on Safari on iOS or not? And if you can't, what definition of 'control' is that, again?

UltraViolence 4y ago

I have no problems using Ctrl+ on those sites with Firefox. What seems to be the problem?

mmatuzo21 4y ago
Mobile!

tifadg1 4y ago

yeah, I know a thing or two about zooming in, having set HN to 190%. On an unrelated note, why is HN text so small? I understand if it were a hunting site, where you're naturally supposed to use a scope, but for an IT forum that's unusual, given half of us wear glasses!

jandrese 4y ago
It's easily readable on my display, but I'm not using one of those fancy HiDPI displays. The bigger problem is when posts are printed with a 50% grey font on top of a 25% grey background. Like it's such an obvious usability issue that I have no idea why the developer who set it up didn't have a little laugh at their own expense for the mistake the first time they saw it and then immediately went back and fixed it. Why it it still like this in 2022?
- tifadg1 4y ago
  not sure I qualify for hidpi - 1900x1200 on a 24". Also I never had issues regarding different shades. Hah just goes to show - hard to please everybody!
  - jandrese 4y ago
    1900x1200 on 24" is definitely not HiDPI. That's 93.625 PPI. HiDPI generally starts at 200 PPI and goes up from there.

evo_9 4y ago

Even more fun on Windows Outlook keeps uninstalling the Zoom calendar plugin and replacing it with Teams. Fucking Microsoft.

etaioinshrdlu 4y ago

My web app is in some sense a Figma-like design tool. It has built-in zoom functionality that conflicts with browser zoom. I have to disable zoom in order to make the app usable. iOS in particular is pretty hostile to this. There's another angle here, which is that being pro-browser zoom is anti-web application, and implicitly preferring native applications. This is actually playing into Apple's hands of enforcing their walled garden and the Apple tax. They are neutering web apps intentionally.

bluesmoon 4y ago

> I don't know whether this is a trend I posted this 11 years ago: https://tech.bluesmoon.info/2011/01/device-width-and-how-not-to-hate-your.html https://tech.bluesmoon.info/2011/01/device-width-and-how-not... It's not a trend, it's been around as long as it's been possible. Site owners dislike letting their users have control.

IE6 4y ago

Sort of related - I like the way ChromeOS handles gesture zoom - it just zooms in the screen so everything is enlarged including Chrome OS UI elements. Then the browser can do its own zooming and finally the OS has a zoom level. Best of all worlds IMHO.

gernb 4y ago

It's not just websites. Youtube Music's app uses too small of a font on iPad and changing the system font size under accessability doesn't change the font size in the app (well, it changes a few headlines but leaves everything thing else too small for my eyes) AND of course it doesn't support zoom because almost no native apps support zoom. (Why do they get a pass?)

soheil 4y ago

First I thought this is Zoom the video conf software; please, stop using easily misinterpreted wording. Then I realized on iOS since about 6 years ago disabling zoom via meta tags takes no effect and you can still zoom; please, stop being lazy and not do your research before complaining. Finally I realize on android and desktop this is still an issue but maybe those sites have valid reasons like they want the page look exactly as they intended for aesthetics or even in some cases functional reasons; please, stop assuming developers are just lazy and obviously want to annoy people with disabilities.

godot 4y ago

"width=device-width, initial-scale=1, user-scalable=no" seems like basically a setting that some tutorial had once posted many years ago, and all responsive sites just blindly took it as gospel; because it was supposed to give you one unified view for your site on mobile. Understandably, back in the days (and maybe still the case now) the default behavior for web browsers on mobile were to load the same desktop site but zoomed out -- it wasn't a great experience, so devs looked for a way to avoid it. I think it's fine to build a mobile responsive site with "width=device-width, initial-scale=1" (that gives you a default view that is built for mobile) but there is little reasons to have "user-scalable=no".

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

Sohcahtoa82 4y ago

Don't disable zoom, and stop fucking with scrolling. Browser scrolling works fine. You don't need to try to re-implement smooth scrolling, it never works and makes my scrolling bounce around like mad. One website override my scrolling speed entirely. I like it so that 1 click = 2 lines of scrolling. That site changed it to that 1 click = 1/2 line, but for some reason the web dev thought they knew better than my preferences.

commandlinefan 4y ago
It drives me crazy when I try to scroll up to re-read something and the header pops up and covers what I was trying to scroll to.

greggman3 4y ago

I don't disable zoom but I'm sympathetic that mobile browsers SUCK at it. here's a very simple SPA like page https://decisive-spiral-blue.glitch.me https://decisive-spiral-blue.glitch.me It's just an upper and lower vertical flexbox. fixed size toolbar on top, the rest is a textarea. Click in the text area. type "A"<enter>, "B"<enter>, "C"<enter> etc... and watch the cursor disappear below the virtual keyboard. WTF! I've seen other issues where the browser auto-zooms when clicking in a textarea and while they are trying to be helpful they actually make the site practically unusable. Both because info the user needed is now offscreen and because finishing the input doesn't auto-unzoom so the user is left having to manually adjust to see the page again. And then, there are random rules (like if the text is larger than 16px it might not auto-zoom). Might. AFAIK there is no spec that says "hey, don't auto-zoom" so your left with random hacks to try to make the site usable. (of course if the user wants to zoom that's fine) The point is, the mobile browsing experience sucks by default and devs do the best they can to try to work around how much it sucks. They choose wrong but they wouldn't be reaching for solutions if the default experience wasn't so bad in the first place. I'd personally like to be able to opt in to a mode where when the virtual keyboard appears the browser's size changes and I can fix my layout for the new available size via CSS media queries.

tshaddox 4y ago

Apple gets a lot of criticism for its alleged hostility towards developers. I agree with some of that criticism! But this is a perfect example of Apple taking the side of the user when developers are hostile towards users. I’ve only used iPhones for years and I didn’t even realize this was still a problem for smartphone users!

manderley 4y ago
You can force-enable zoom in pretty much all browsers, it's part of the accessibility settings. You don't need an Iphone.
- Handytinge 4y ago
  No, but the point was that they didn't even realise the issue existed, as iOS has this as a default behaviour. Reading the article I was surprised to hear of the issue and could not replicate. I am capable of finding the relevant setting in Android I'm sure, but many older and tech illiterate people in my life (who are more likely to need zoom) I think would struggle.

NDizzle 4y ago

I just changed the daily life of one of my mechanics. They use Napa Parts Trails (or something along those lines) and when he clicked into something, it pops up a tab without any controls and they had no idea how to adjust the text size. Because it removes all the controls. New laptop, super high DPI, super tiny characters in a shop environment. I taught him the nearly universal ctrl mouse wheel hotkey combo so that he can scale things, and then proceeded to adjust about a half dozen different areas in the various applications he uses for managing jobs and ordering parts.

dandigangi 4y ago

Wild that people argue against a11y and usability. I'm sure there is some cases where it doesn't matter but for the rest, hard requirement. At DocuSign it would put us out of compliance if I'm not mistaken.

nathias 4y ago

> This can have serious negative consequences for people with low vision, elderly people and pretty much anyone who has to or wants to zoom in. I disable it because there are bugs on mobile browsers where inputs can automatically hijack zoom and the default behavior really messes up the workflow. But yea you have to reimplement or replace it with a flow for your use case.

humanwhosits 4y ago

Why does the web browser allow this?

knorker 4y ago

Also stop messing with scroll. Absolutely everything that isn't default browser zoom is broken. It's the wrong speed, or cuts at the wrong place. Basically it's always surprising in an annoying way. Then there's the "frustratingly slow scroll to navigate". E.g. go to https://cloud.google.com/compute/all-pricing https://cloud.google.com/compute/all-pricing and click on the last nav on the left.

mamoriamohit 4y ago

It's specially painful when the zoom is disabled, and then a pop up comes up with a teeny tiny X close button. I agree I have fat fingers but 8 our of 10 times, I end up opening up the ad. :(

revskill 4y ago

Lol, i thought this is the video streaming software Zoom.

culturedsystems 4y ago

"Safari seems to ignore maximum-scale=1 and user-scalable=no" This is somewhat ironic because, if memory serves, the original reason people started adding this to their HTML was because of some dubious scaling behaviour on iOS Safari (I think, if you didn't disable zooming, Safari responded to rotation by zooming the page to fill the new width, rather than laying out the page again).

elipsey 4y ago

>As a user, you can force allow zooming: >In Firefox find the settings, select “Accessibility” and activate “Zoom on all website” >In Chrome find the settings, select “Accessibility” and check “Force enable zoom” OMFG, thank you.

emptyparadise 4y ago

I love websites which also set element scaling using vw and vh in addition to the tricks described in the article, meaning that not only pinch-zoom doesn't work, even the good old ctrl-scroll does nothing. It gets even funnier if your screen size is larger than a MacBook's.

mensetmanusman 4y ago

I hate websites that don’t allow zoom, I have to screenshot and zoom on that…

egberts1 4y ago

As a disabled person, I totally recoiled and revulsed at the OP’s audacity and emboldeness to demand how other should behave toward him. I would never pull someone down to sit down to my eye level if in a wheelchair, never. I would never pull someone closer to me so I can read lips better. And certainly I would never remotely pull them to something that I want, as in this case, digital remote camera. However, it is a courtesy to ask them to adjust for your sake. And only a courtesy. This OP dude needs a proverbial slap across the face. Just ask, curtly and nicely.

zachflower 4y ago
I'm so sorry, I'm not 100% sure I understand this comment. Would you mind explaining what you mean by asking others to adjust for your sake in the context of mobile web accessibility? I'm having trouble connecting it to the content of the article. I'm not the writer, but would love to better understand your point of view here.
- egberts1 4y ago
  Ah, remote zooming is being given in a different context. I had thought it was about allowing other people to play with the gimbal and focus and that kind of “zoom” … of a remote camera variety. My bad. Still, asking others to adjust is a nice thing. Demanding to do things on their end, not so much.
  - zachflower 4y ago
    Ah, I see. Thanks for clarifying!

efitz 4y ago

If we want a free and open internet, why is the current web designed to let server owners control our experience? This leads to accessibility fails like the inability for visually challenged people to control font size or contrast, but also leads to lots of other bad effects, like the fact that my browser gets more and more bloated every year and essentially has become a tool to let other people run programs (javascript and wasm) on my computer, and display content that they want (ads, etc.) rather than content that I want. I really want an internet where servers provide structured content, but where I control my user experience.

krapp 4y ago
>If we want a free and open internet, why is the current web designed to let server owners control our experience? Because server owners have the freedom to publish whatever they like (within the bounds of the law) and design their sites however they wish. An internet on which servers are only allowed to provide "structured content" would be significantly less free and open. You may be interested in the Gemini Protocol[0], on which sites are built according to that general principle. [0]https://gemini.circumlunar.space/ https://gemini.circumlunar.space/
- barnabee 4y ago
  They can send whatever data they like but they have no right of control over what I do with it or how it’s rendered. Browsers would be better if they prioritised user preferences over website designers.
  - krapp 4y ago
    >Browsers would be better if they prioritised user preferences over website designers. The vast majority of users would prefer not to have to write an entire layout and stylesheet for each site they visit, nor would they consider having all sites conform to a single layout or style to be of any value. It's only very small minority of people (probably exclusive to HN) who would prefer the web was nothing more than JSON or raw bitstreams. But again - geminispace works the way you want. Gemtext doesn't use stylesheets and only has very basic markup. Everything is dictated and controlled by the browser. And the protocol is specifically designed such that writing a client for it is easy.

hedora 4y ago

Ironically, the custom styling on the code snippets prevents them from fitting on my screen at any zoom level.

noveltyaccount 4y ago

1000% agree, one of my biggest pet peeves. Glad the article shares the (user-side) solution: force enable zoom in accessibility. One of my other pet peeves is web sites that shrink the default text size. Why??? I set my browser and OS to a text size that is useable for me, please defer to me, your user. Thanks muchly.

realstacktrace 4y ago

Who else read "zoom" and thought "Zoom"?

hedora 4y ago
As, in "what does it mean to disable it, and how do I?" Some corporate training long ago had "I can't see videos" and "I can't hear things" toggles that were not mutually exclusive. If you set it to "Hellen Keller mode", you could just read the training at your own pace. It was glorious. Thank you, accessiblity advocates!

r00fus 4y ago

I have setup for myself and my parents that all mobile Safari sites automatically go to reader mode. Reader mode does not prevent zoom, copying, etc. It's just one click to remove it for form-based websites (a few steps to whitelist if you're going to use that web form a lot), but the readability for the vast majority of websites is drastically improved.

neoCrimeLabs 4y ago

Rather than trying to convince web developers, how possible is this to get the feature depreciated in browsers?

neoyagami 4y ago

Oh god. this, yes please, I got a mild sight disability and the zoom helps doing my work fast, the amount of times zoom was disabled it was just awfull, and in some cases parts of the site (ex: big tables) cannot be read properly.

teilo 4y ago

Current versions of Chrome do not even have an Accessibility section. The referenced setting is nowhere to be found.

arbol 4y ago

Great tips. I've now enabled zoom in my accessibility settings in Brave. I've often been annoyed by lack of zoom

es7 4y ago

If you leave zoom enabled on mobile, then the browser tries to handle double-tap-to-zoom, which adds a surprisingly large delay to all taps while it waits to see if there is a second tap coming. This makes websites feel sluggish and unresponsive. Is there a good way to get lightning-fast response times to tap events without disabling zoom in 2022?

aeternum 4y ago
Yes, this is really why most mobile sites disable it (at least it's the primary reason I do). Latency matters a lot and everyone taps, not everyone zooms.
eyelidlessness 4y ago
CSS one liner: a, button, .etc { touch-action: manipulation; }

bdeshi 4y ago

another annoyance is links that open in new tabs. if i want to open a link in a new tab, i can do it myself, websites don't have to decide for me.

login01 4y ago

Could you add the watts, voltage & amperage, to each of the standards? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB. USB Power Delivery Rev. 1.0 (V. 1.0) 2012-07-05 100 W (20 V, 5 A) USB Power Delivery Rev. 1.0 (V. 1.3) 2014-03-11 100 W (20 V, 5 A) USB Power Delivery Rev. 2.0 (V. 1.0) 2014-08-11 100 W (20 V, 5 A) USB Power Delivery Rev. 2.0 (V. 1.1) 2015-05-07 100 W (20 V, 5 A) USB Power Delivery Rev. 2.0 (V. 1.2) 2016-03-25 100 W (20 V, 5 A) USB Power Delivery Rev. 2.0 (V. 1.3) 2017-01-12 100 W (20 V, 5 A) USB Power Delivery Rev. 3.0 (V. 1.1) 2017-01-12 100 W (20 V, 5 A) USB Power Delivery Rev. 3.0 (V. 1.2) 2018-06-21 100 W (20 V, 5 A) USB Power Delivery Rev. 3.0 (V. 2.0) 2019-08-29 100 W (20 V, 5 A) USB Power Delivery Rev. 3.1 (V. 1.0) 2021-05-24 240 W (48 V, 5 A) USB Power Delivery Rev. 3.1 (V. 1.1) 2021-07-06 240 W (48 V, 5 A) USB Power Delivery Rev. 3.1 (V. 1.2) 2021-10-26 240 W (48 V, 5 A)

lsaferite 4y ago
I feel like this comment is on the wrong thread maybe?

happythebob 4y ago

Oof, an article about accessibility with a headline using the term "disabling." I'm otherwise with the article, and also for old IT updating their terms.

bhdzllr 4y ago

Maybe a lot of people did this to prevent Safari on iPhone to zoom in when an input field gets focus. But if I remember correctly the correct way to prevent this was to set the font-size of the input field to at least 16px. EDIT: More infos: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2989263/disable-auto-zoom-in-input-text-tag-safari-on-iphone https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2989263/disable-auto-zoo...

synthecypher 4y ago

Not sure why this became a trend my guess is back when everyone was trying to update their website to support mobile devices, they want to deliver an 'app-like' experience and as native apps don't let you pinch zoom the native UI wherever you like and mobile sites followed suit. I guess the issue now is it has become part of the cargo cult with people including these meta tags in their base templates without knowing what it does and failing to implement a suitable layout for all mobile device screen sizes and DPIs. https://github.com/h5bp/html5-boilerplate/blob/main/src/index.html#L8 https://github.com/h5bp/html5-boilerplate/blob/main/src/inde...