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Comment by nostromo | Hacker News Reader

It's so much easier to fuck up mobile than it is to do it right. And if you're not doing it exactly right, don't do it at all.

Here's what the EC2 console looks like on mobile:

http://i.imgur.com/MfbCdhU.png

It appears that Amazon is doing this on purpose...

Yes... user-scalable=no

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> Disabling user-scalable (namely, the ability to double tap to zoom) allows the browser to reduce the click delay. In touch-enable browsers, when the user expects the double tap to zoom, the browser generally waits 300ms before firing the click event, waiting to see if the user will double tap. Disabling user-scalable allows for the Chrome browser to fire the click event immediately, allowing for a better user experience.

> From Google IO 2013 session https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=Dujf...

Source: http://stackoverflow.com/a/16910559

I doubt that's why. In this case, as the site doesn't appear to render well at all on mobile in the first place, that meta tag was probably just blindly copy pasted from somewhere else that did have a responsive page.

There was/is an iOS bug where changing orientation after zooming would cut-off some of the page, most websites simply disable all zooming to "fix" it. http://blog.pgrady.com/post/29511322784/fixing-the-ios-orien...

Why would anybody want to enable zoom in the first place? Properly designed mobile web apps should already have decent sized text and graphics. In addition to the iOS orientation bug you mention, there's also that annoying click delay.

A lot of people at StackExchange seem to recommend zooming though:

http://ux.stackexchange.com/questions/19464/should-mobile-op...

I may want to zoom to see an image up close, or just to change text size. Outside apple, phone screens vary widely, and so do text sizes. You can't hope to find one that works on all phones for everyone.

Because on a small screen the size vs data density tradeoff has a sweet spot that varies from one pair of eyeballs to the next.

Yeah, that's true. But are we talking eyeballs within the same age group, or like teens vs. old people?

In my experience, it varies both within age groups and between age groups.

Some people don't have as good of eyesight as others. Let them adjust the site to fit what they like.

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