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Please stop disabling zoom

matuzo.at

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Re: Please stop disabling zoom

#161

Post by HWR_14 »

dreamcompiler wrote: post #134
zionic wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe this is a good place to ask since there's a lot of web devs here: What is SO effing hard about drawing within the screen on web?! I can't tell you the number of times I've seen this issue. Just the other day I saw reddit's sign up form is totally broken on iOS, you have to swap between landscape/portrait multiple times and hope whatever garbage layout engine it uses redraws the button inside the screen.

I think it's because almost all web design happens on computer screens, not mobile devices. More important, all web designers show their bosses their creations on a big computer screen in a conference room--the bigger the better so everybody can go "oooh!" and "aaaah!" and the designer can get a big fat raise. I expect it's fairly rare for the employer of a web designer to give a shit what the site looks like on a ph…

What's strange about that is that a collection of old devices is very cheap. It's trivial to have a box and test them.

Re: Please stop disabling zoom

#163

Post by GekkePrutser »

jandrese wrote: post #124
calvinmorrison wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's just constant. I know I am an oddball but I use firefox, which at this point is basically unsupported online. Pages just _dont_ work right. Of course my 600 extensions, from tridactyl(vim kb) to no script tend to break even more. But it frustrates me to no end that a browser is no longer a "User" Agent and is now just seen as a... virtual machine for apps?

As a fellow Firefox user this is not my experience at all. Most stuff works fine once I allow the necessary subset in uMatrix. Some things are a pain in the ass, like embedded video widgets that need to load in dozens of scripts from all over the web before they'll finally get to the actual video frames, but I can pretty much always get stuff to work. One tip: Don't try to install too many general filtering extension…

Same here..I don't even have another browser installed on my main machine. Never have the need for it, FF works great. I think the OP has too many plugins :)

Re: Please stop disabling zoom

#164

Post by sorahn »

rootusrootus wrote: post #26

100% agree. I'd like to be able to tell mobile Safari to just ignore that setting. Maybe there's a way and I missed it. Wouldn't be surprised, these old eyeballs aren't what they used to be and that exactly why I want zoom to always work. Some of us actually need it. Heck, back when I bought my mother her first iPad, this was the whole reason. She was getting eye surgery and wouldn't be able to see well, and would be…

> I'd like to be able to tell mobile Safari to just ignore that setting

Mobile Safari does ignore this setting. You have to go out of your way with stopping touch events on mobile safari to prevent zooming.

Sometimes this is problematic for sites using "small" (< 16px) fonts for input fields because that will cause mobile safari to zoom in to show the input field whether you want it to or not.

Re: Please stop disabling zoom

#165

Post by greggman3 »

I don't disable zoom but I'm sympathetic that mobile browsers SUCK at it.

here's a very simple SPA like page

https://decisive-spiral-blue.glitch.me

It's just an upper and lower vertical flexbox. fixed size toolbar on top, the rest is a textarea. Click in the text area. type "A", "B", "C" etc... and watch the cursor disappear below the virtual keyboard. WTF!

I've seen other issues where the browser auto-zooms when clicking in a textarea and while they are trying to be helpful they actually make the site practically unusable. Both because info the user needed is now offscreen and because finishing the input doesn't auto-unzoom so the user is left having to manually adjust to see the page again.

And then, there are random rules (like if the text is larger than 16px it might not auto-zoom). Might. AFAIK there is no spec that says "hey, don't auto-zoom" so your left with random hacks to try to make the site usable. (of course if the user wants to zoom that's fine)

The point is, the mobile browsing experience sucks by default and devs do the best they can to try to work around how much it sucks. They choose wrong but they wouldn't be reaching for solutions if the default experience wasn't so bad in the first place.

I'd personally like to be able to opt in to a mode where when the virtual keyboard appears the browser's size changes and I can fix my layout for the new available size via CSS media queries.

Re: Please stop disabling zoom

#166

Post by tshaddox »

Apple gets a lot of criticism for its alleged hostility towards developers. I agree with some of that criticism! But this is a perfect example of Apple taking the side of the user when developers are hostile towards users. I’ve only used iPhones for years and I didn’t even realize this was still a problem for smartphone users!

Re: Please stop disabling zoom

#167

Post by renewiltord »

emteycz wrote: post #5
renewiltord wrote: post #3

Looks like a user agent concern.

No. Sometimes it's good to disable zoom (e. g. in web apps that function as a big canvas, like Figma). Pages should use the feature correctly. People shouldn't have to fiddle with browser settings just because someone can't CSS properly.

I am convinced. I wish per-site zoom controls would show up as a setting somewhere in the browser chrome because I think that would make this a non-issue, but the differentiation is valuable since some sites should block zoom. Okay.

Re: Please stop disabling zoom

#168

Post by NDizzle »

I just changed the daily life of one of my mechanics. They use Napa Parts Trails (or something along those lines) and when he clicked into something, it pops up a tab without any controls and they had no idea how to adjust the text size. Because it removes all the controls. New laptop, super high DPI, super tiny characters in a shop environment.

I taught him the nearly universal ctrl mouse wheel hotkey combo so that he can scale things, and then proceeded to adjust about a half dozen different areas in the various applications he uses for managing jobs and ordering parts.

Re: Please stop disabling zoom

#169

Post by dandigangi »

Wild that people argue against a11y and usability. I'm sure there is some cases where it doesn't matter but for the rest, hard requirement. At DocuSign it would put us out of compliance if I'm not mistaken.
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