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by jnovek 25 days ago

I keep my browser zoomed in substantially to compensate for uncorrectable vision issues. I’d say perhaps once per day I’ll encounter a website that has never had zoom in/out (ctl +/-) tested because if you zoom up even one level from 100%, everything breaks.

There are several equally useless failure modes I’ve seen with this, a few off the top of my head:

  - rendering fails, everything falls apart

  - some elements disappear

  - it drops into the feature-limited mobile view

  - the author or framework overrides zoom with some other behavior — this one makes me especially crazy because they had to do *extra work* to screw up accessibility

Certain websites are impossible for me to use and I just avoid them.

2 comments

Joker_vD 24 days ago

I remember seeing a website that had <html style="font-size: XXX%"> for the top-level element, and had JS that would dynamically recalculate that percentage on every resize event to keep the visual font size almost (exactly) constant. Made me think for a moment that my mouse wheel broke.

jandrese 24 days ago

One of my pet peeves in the modern web is when someone displays an image and scales it to exactly the size of your screen, but I want to look more closely at a part of the image so I do a scrollwheel zoom, only for the image to actually shrink as every UI element except the thing I want gets bigger. And then you go "ok, right click on the image and do the "Open Image in new tab" thing and somehow the site defeats that and puts all of their UI crap in the new tab as well.

bryanrasmussen 24 days ago

I figure there must be an extension to handle these problems, I googled and the AI gave me a bunch of helpful answers, which all happened to be Chrome extensions despite me using FF. hmmm. It did also say it could help me find FF extensions if I really wanted them, but there seems to be some shenanigans going on here.

Anyway, an extension should solve it.

A propos image tricks sites pull, I've noticed before the right click for images don't work at all in Instagram web, I wonder how they do that, probably background on a div.

Joker_vD 24 days ago

In my experience, the reader mode works perfectly fine for sites like that (it worked for that one site I mentioned in my original comment as well) both in Chrome and Firefox.

sixeyes 23 days ago

i think firefox shows the "open image in new tab" for backgrounds also, now. at least sometimes. still easily defeated by putting an invisible div above it so no right clicks reach it... or do some js bullshit to disable right clicks...

masfuerte 24 days ago

The modern version is to use @media to achieve the same annoying effect without js. Fortunately, there's a finite number of rules so I've found that if you zoom far enough the text does actually start getting larger. Though I expect that someone's already figured out how to use CSS Math to keep text tiny at all zoom levels.

bryanrasmussen 24 days ago

>The modern version is to use @media to achieve the same annoying effect without js.

I think that is the up until about 2020 way, the modern way is using clamp to do it

https://css-tricks.com/linearly-scale-font-size-with-css-cla...

dotancohen 24 days ago

Six years is getting long in the tooth. Isn't it about time to upend everything once again and invent another cascading wheel that trades old, familiar edge cases for new, unfamiliar edge cases?

bryanrasmussen 24 days ago

clamp is superior to @media because it solves a common problem with @media, although I am more apt to consider that problem in relation to proportions of divs and margins given the needs of responsiveness.

Indeed I'm not sure what edge case I might expect to find given the ability of using clamp in conjunction with @media.

pbalau 25 days ago

> I’d say perhaps once per day I’ll encounter a website that has never had zoom in/out (ctl +/-) tested because if you zoom up even one level from 100%, everything breaks

Just tested, hn breaks if you zoom >110%.

oneeyedpigeon 25 days ago

How does it break for you? Seems OK to me on android — in fact, I already had it at 110%. Reminded me to check my desktop settings which have HN fixed at 125%. I cannot believe that, in 2026, the default font size is set at 12px — is anyone actually reading it at that size?!

ryandrake 24 days ago

> I cannot believe that, in 2026, the default font size is set at 12px — is anyone actually reading it at that size?!

The very first "quality of life" thing I do when I install a new computer / operating system nowadays is double (sometimes triple) the default font size. 12pt was probably fine when our monitors were 640x480, and when we were 18 years old.

pbalau 24 days ago

For some reason I though the GP was talking about browsing on mobile, where I have the issue:

https://imgbox.com/EiovsE5b https://imgbox.com/A4Fl9lE9

whstl 24 days ago

The same issue happens on desktop but it requires zooming a bit more than 110%, and is screen-size dependent.

voidUpdate 24 days ago

I leave HN on default everything, but I have a 1080p monitor so it might look bigger for me than someone with a higher resolution monitor... I don't know how that works. But I often have to zoom out of websites linked here because the text is so big and it feels uncomfortable to read

chowells 24 days ago

Yeah, 12px is fine (27" 1440p, no display scaling). It is on the small side. I'd go a bit larger for something I made. But it's not a small enough to slow down my reading.

cestith 25 days ago

Which platform is this on? I usually read hn on a desktop browser, and it works fine well above 110% there.

pbalau 24 days ago

Android

https://imgbox.com/EiovsE5b https://imgbox.com/A4Fl9lE9

cestith 24 days ago

I use DuckDuckGo Browser, Firefox, and Chrome on Android pretty much in that order of preference. In both mobile mode and desktop mode all of these browsers support pinch zoom and two-finger drag scrolling. I have no problems with this site using those.

I think we might need a little more information than just the OS to differentiate.

jabroni_salad 24 days ago

I browse everything at 125% and HN is fine on my machine so I decided to check. It depends on your width.

1080px wide (aka on my vertical monitor) HN comments stop reflowing > 300%

At 1920px wide it never stops reflowing.

pbalau 24 days ago

For some reason I though the GP was talking about browsing on mobile, where I have the issue:

https://imgbox.com/EiovsE5b https://imgbox.com/A4Fl9lE9