[Chris_Newton]

If you rotate an iPad from portrait to landscape, for example, then the default behaviour in Safari is to show the same page layout as you had before, but scale it up to the new width. That's far from ideal if your site uses a responsive design that could adapt quite happily to use the extra width in a landscape orientation.

[bigiain]

Can I just mention that at least on my phone, websites that "adapt" to landscape mode often bug the hell out of me. With my getting-old-eyesight, I often rotate to landscape mode to get bigger text so I can read it more easily. When a website goes "Oh look, more horizontal pixels, I'll shrink the middle column and add some nav on the left and ads on the right!"; I'll usually just hit [back] and move on to some other site.

(Possibly interesting idea: add some analytics so that you can detect portrait/landscape orientation changes, and report on bounce rates immediately afterwards…)

[Chris_Newton]

In our defence, we do our best to keep the standard zoom gesture working and we use a reasonable default font size. We're not 21 any more either. ;-)

However, for most of our users, a zoomed single-column layout is going to be less useful than switching to two columns when in landscape mode on an iPad.

On an iPhone, you should see a single-column layout in either orientation using the design we're currently testing.

[barumrho]

Can't you disable zooming to solve that problem?

[bigiain]

I suggest you ask your 40+ year old users (or any users with less than 20/20 vision) about what they think of you disabling zooming on them…

[Chris_Newton]

Yes, but that workaround has accessibility problems of its own.