[untog]

While I do symapthise with those lamenting the lack of pinch-to-zoom, I'm confused: apps don't offer pinch to zoom, so how do you use them? If you can use an app fine without pinch to zoom, you should really be able to use a mobile website fine too.

It seems to me that this is an either/or proposition: either you have a not-mobile, pinch-to-zoom-able web site, or you have a mobile-specific site with an app-like viewport that does not allow pinch to zoom. Both of these seem like fine options to me, and I don't think it's a huge loss to lose the middle ground.

[nathancahill]

You're talking about two fundamentally different things. Apps are designed specifically for mobile, so of course they will work well fine at the scale they were designed at.

Ideally, websites would be designed to work fine at any scale from mobile to desktop (responsive design). However, many mobile websites are delivered today as downscaled/simplified versions of the desktop site. This means there's a lot of design that crosses over from desktop to mobile. When you add disabled scaling on top of that, many things break, like content being too wide or font sizes being too small.

[eru]

It's a shame. HTML was originally meant to be quite device unaware, and display fine on toasters.

[nathancahill]

HTML is fine, it's the CSS/JavaScript that's the problem. If we were just displaying HTML we wouldn't be having this discussion.

[dredmorbius]

It's more a matter of how the tools are used, and provisions for client side overrides. Reader mode is a godsend, though the delay on showing the icon and lack of a default option are both capital flaws.

[creshal]

I dunno, 90s era table layouts weren't exactly flexible either…

[dredmorbius]

Mobile now covers a wide range of scales.

[monochromatic]

You're right in principle, but in practice a lot of zoom-disabling websites have text that's smaller than it should be. Apps seem not to have this problem as much.

[briandear]

I agree. I think the issue is that apps are purpose built for a device while web attempts to 'average' the experience across a range. Honestly, I think many designers don't actually preview their pages on real devices either.

[mattmanser]

Because the middle ground is what happens in real life. Many sites have poorly designed mobile experiences that zoom helps fix. I personally have my mobile Chrome set to over-ride site viewport settings to always allow zoom.

For example wikipedia (used to?) disable zoom while making all their pictures small. But what if the picture has the information you want to see?

This is because a lot of content on the internet is long form reading with pictures, and ideally you'd want the middle ground, responsive quick scrolling with the ability to zoom on pictures, infographics, etc. and then zoom out again to carry on reading.

And before you say it, all picture viewers on mobile suck. We already have an amazing, built in solution.

[AlphaSite]

Apps also support a lot more in the way of accessibility features, e.g. Dynamically resizable text.

[tracker1]

Tell that to the guys behind the facebook app for android.. they don't respect the accessibility feature at all, and their text is too damned tiny... (haven't used it in nearly two years, since they started pushing messenger as a separate app, I don't need two battery zapping apps running all the time).

[achairapart]

Reading all the answers here and to me it seems that the problem is not the metatag nor the fastclick, but just poorly designed responsive websites.

[stevetrewick]

No, you're wrong. The meta tag is a problem. No matter how subjectively 'good' a design is, it should still not be up to the designer to decide to break a fundamental UX paradigm of my device, nor to decide what size of text I should be able to read.

Setting the viewport meta this way is practically the definition of an accessibility micro aggression.

[achairapart]

I mean that if websites where more well designed users won't need to zoom at all most of the time. Not that they must not do it.

Pinch to zoom is a beautiful feature and part of the success of the early iPhone and iOS, and it was there because at the time there was no mobile web design at all.

The fact that so many users still go in panic mode today reveals how mobile web design is far from perfect.

That said, there'd be also legitimate design reasons to use the viewport metatag to disable the zoom. Good designers know the rules and know when they can break them. I don't believe in accessibility dogma.

[ori_b]

Many apps do have pinch to zoom on viewports. Just about any app that displays pictures, for example, or any app that displays large amounts of text.

[jakejake]

That's true but those are scalable components within the app specifically designed to be scalable. You're not scaling the entire app window.

If you have an area you want to be scalable, you'll have to implement it in JavaScript or use a pre-made component.

[ori_b]

I actually find myself wishing I could scale whole apps on mobile sometimes.

[tracker1]

Some apps are problematic, and many don't follow the accessability settings for font size, as an example... the facebook app on android is all but impossible for me to read (far sighted). Some devices don't set their dpi correctly, and are even worse since the default settings make things way too small.

If you can't display close to 12pt text in your app at least as a visability option, then there are probably quite a few people that can't use your app... lower than 10pt is almost inexcusable imho.