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Comment by hypervis0r | Hacker News Reader

The author disabled resizing (zooming) on mobile, leaving the text unreadable. Why do people do this at all? I've seen it happen so often.

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Zooms fine for me on my iPhone 7. Reader mode also works, which is like a magic fix crappy website button nowadays.

Tangentially, had anyone noticed a weird zooming bug on mobile safari that appears to cancel a zoom gesture and jump back to the unzoomed view? Quitting the app from the app switcher appears to fix it.

Safari on iOS has been ignoring the user-scalable=no viewport setting since iOS 10. This was done to improve accessibility for the users.

> “Tangentially, had anyone noticed a weird zooming bug on mobile safari that appears to cancel a zoom gesture and jump back to the unzoomed view? Quitting the app from the app switcher appears to fix it.”

yes, it happens on my ipad pro running ios 12.2 (16E227). have been meaning to upgrade thinking that would fix it, but maybe that’s not the case?

Happens on my iPad Pro in the latest 12.4 betas, I can only bypass it by slowing down as I’ve zoomed in, a quick gesture snaps back and is ignored, but a quick gesture followed by waiting a second seems to preserve the zooming in. It happens most often on this site, for me, probably because I’m trying to zoom in to click tiny links, even on an iPad Pro.

I had noticed that it appears to happen a lot here on HN but I didn’t want to say incase of confirmation bias.

What you are seeing is the default way a website looks on a mobile device, not anything that was opted into. The site does not 'disable resizing', it just doesn't have any mobile support. The author has chosen, thus far, not to put in the effort to support mobile sizes well.

Zooming works on both Chrome & Firefox for me. (Android)

Zooms just fine on Firefox 67.0 on Android. Even goes into 'reader mode' and is zoom-able there on the same.

What browser/mobile OS are you using?

My guess is they want it to look like man pages

The accessibility options of your browser should let you forcibly enable zooming regardless of what the author mandates.

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