[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.