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It's just a mobile thing due to pixel scaling. In the overflow menu, of the browser bar, check the "desktop site" box and you can zoom in.

You'd expect touch-gesture zoom to still work under pixel scaling though. You'd expect to just see a downsampled image up close, plus normal-looking text up close, right?

Here even the text doesn't zoom.

If the viewport meta tag includes user-scalable=no, then it won't scale on mobile. Personally I don't like that setting much, since it is bad for a11y.

It does also prevent accidental zooms when users intend to scroll, so maybe that's a use? Often times the meta viewport tag (which is quite arcane) is just copy-pasted without deep knowledge of what it does.

Two finger zoom is working fine for me. I am using Chrome on Android with the "Force enable zoom" setting enabled.

In FireFox it's under the accessibility options.

Behold,

Two fingers.

Facebook, an image sharing site, does this too on their mobile site version... why?