The more sites attempt "proper mobile views" the worse it gets. In 2011, mobile safari was practically perfect. Now half the sites I visit have found some way to dick things up because they hired some nitwit designer to "mobile first" things to shit.
This has been my experience as well. I'm sure there're sensible things to tweak on a "regular" web site to make it more mobile friendly. The web development community just went to the extreme with gimmickry and the web suffers for it, desktop or mobile.
Amen brother! We could browse the web as it was intended to be on our iPhones in 2007-11, and then this responsive fad comes along and we're back to "mobile special" designs again...(remember WAP?)
Those "mobile special" layouts are annoying enough on their own on a phone (with their dumbing down of the UI), but they are doubly annoying when you're used to the web version of a website, and have to hunt for things in the "responsive" mobile version.
iOS supports zooming the entire screen as part of its accessibility feature set. Though you have to turn it on, and the gesture is three-finger-tap and drag instead of pinch.
I have bumped into this countless times - street names too small, I subconsciously pinch to zoom, street names get scaled accordingly and are still too small for me. The solution is simple - just move the i<Device> closer to my face - but it's thrown me a couple times. Not sure if this is a UX error or just me being daft.
Unfortunately, I'm far sighted, anything closer than about 12-18" from my face tends to be blurry... I know I can/should wear glasses... but really, the phone is the only device I typically have a problem with generally speaking.
Working with a visually disabled colleague recently iI'm becoming all to painfully aware of how much this is the exception. For Web, apps, OS, devices, and more.
I couldn't disagree more. There should always be a way to make the content I'm looking at bigger in order to see it more clearly, especially for users with poor eyesight.
"responsive design" does not magically eliminate this need, and I agree with the posters saying that disabling of user-scrolling should never have even been allowed in the first place.
And that's not even touching on the fact that most "responsive" sites I've seen get it horribly wrong.
Not at all true... I am far sighted, since most of what I look at, including my monitors are more than a few feet away, I tend to see them fine.. my phone is the only device I really have a lot of trouble with. I run in "extra large" font mode, and set my browser zoom to 125%... even then many sites, I have trouble seeing stuff... if there's an image that isn't full width, then I likely can't make out the detail....
Not being able to zoom in to at least 2x, is a pain... if your content doesn't overflow, then sure set the minimum zoom to 1x, and the max to 2 or 3.. but disabling it altogether is just painful to experience... and many of the "suggestions" to fix mobile scaling include disabling zoom. I'm not even that old (40), but I imagine the problem is worse for people well into their 60's.
If you're using a font-size less than 12pt, you should emphatically NOT be disabling scaling... Unfortunately many sites/apps do just that, and often don't respect the usability settings in the OS (facebook on android was particularly bad, as in too small, before I uninstalled it).
Define 'proper' mobile view. How can the designer know how the user is viewing their site? On a cheap device with low contrast? At an awkward angle at arm's length while trying to keep the baby asleep? Trying to read something quickly when you don't have your reading glasses on you?