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Comment by jaffathecake | Hacker News Reader

Are users adversely affected by this change? In what way?

This change is designed to make the existing web faster. If we improve the performance of rendering, JavaScript, or scrolling, we don't put it behind an opt-in option. Why should this be?

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Well, I'm not suggesting they do my idea instead of what they've done. I'm suggesting they do it in addition to what they've done.

I hate the delay between tapping the screen and the "click" being recognised. It drives me up the wall. I'd far rather switch off "Double-tap to zoom" for all pages (not just those with the relevant meta-tag) and use pinch-to-zoom instead.

There are obviously very good reasons to not disable "Double-tap to zoom" entirely or by default (primarily accessibility, but also the fact that people have gotten used to it) but where's the downside in making it a Setting so that people like me can choose to disable it? Okay, maybe the upside is quite small but there's zero downside and (given that they've already implemented the ability to switch "Double-tap to zoom" off if the webpage has the relevant meta-tag) it would be relatively easy to implement.

Making stuff like this user-configurable is a Good Thing. It's like when Apple changed the behaviour of the iPad's side switch in iOS 4.2 to switch it from rotation lock to audio mute and Steve Jobs said there wouldn't be a configuration option to let users change the switch back to rotation-lock [1]. A lot of people (including me) were disappointed. Fortunately, he changed his mind and iOS 4.3 made the function of the side-switch user-configurable in the Settings.

[1]: http://9to5mac.com/2010/10/23/jobs-there-wont-be-a-mute-swit...

You can actually disable tab delay all together in Chrome Beta. Go to about:flags and enable "Disable tap delay".

I'm on iOS so that's just cruel.

It's not so much the change as letting websites disable zoom. Letting websites disable zoom is a braindead user-hostile decision that could only have been made by people with perfect eyesight (or perfect glasses.)

I have good eyesight. I don't need glasses. I still like to zoom in on text by double-tapping and pinching to zoom. What if I'm on a bus and it's easier to read larger text?

You can add 'with an under-developed theory of mind' to the end of that list.

Or you can get rid of this uncharitable list altogether and replace it with something like 'with a mandate to balance complex trade-offs between technological constraints and competing user, web page, and web application designer needs'.

You don't have to balance complex trade-offs if you make it a configuration setting.

Soooo many "Should we do A or B?" debates over software functionality are settled by "Do A but let the user change it to B in the Settings."

That's a trade-off. Choosing "Do A but let the user change it to B in the Settings" is very similar to "Choose A", because nobody changes settings. You just move the debate to what the default should be. Not to mention that "Should we or shouldn't we have crap-tons of settings?" is its own trade-off.

> That's a trade-off. Choosing "Do A but let the user change it to B in the Settings" is very similar to "Choose A", because nobody changes settings. You just move the debate to what the default should be.

Okay, smart-ass, what's your solution? Maybe we should put the GUI inside a box with the "A or B" decision delegated to a mechanism that monitors a radioactive source. We'll call it Schrodinger's GUI.

I wasn't being a smart-ass at all. I said "you have to balance trade-offs", you said "no, you don't have to, here's a non-trade-off solution", and I said "no, you've just changed the trade-off". Many people seem to think that moving things into configuration is a "free" solution, and I am very non-sarcastically saying that no, it is not. My solution is to be aware that there is no "solution", and you have to balance trade-offs (which is what I said to start!).

That's the thing though (I agree, it's not a nice list, but it's not nice to remove features either). Who says they have a mandate to do the balancing this way? It's their software to do with as they want. That's less mandate and more unilateral.

I wouldn't mind swapping a bit of a delay for a checkbox in the settings. I wouldn't even mind the checkbox being unticked by default.

Just to add there is a Checkbox in Settings (at least on the beta of Chrome) that overrides this behaviour --- it is in accessibility settings

I'm not convinced this makes things worse for any user. Can you think of a case?

I also have good eyesight and like to zoom. I zoom HN until just before the layout breaks on the desktop.

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