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Comment by beachy | Hacker News Reader

This should instead be labeled "the restaurant industry's worst implementation".

Just last night we were trying to order from a restaurant that uses a service called qrfy.com for their menu.

I assume from the URL that this service specializes in this. Despite that the UI is... poor.

The font is too small (probably fine for the 20 something designer that built it). That's not a biggy, but then someone decided to disable pinch zoom.

Being techy, I can show the others how to work around that by doing a screen shot, then looking at the result in the gallery, where zooming does work. That's a crap experience though, because I can only see one page at a time. I just want to browse a menu! And I need to do tech support to show others how to do Android screen grab (gorilla swipe from right to left).

All so very fucking ridiculous for something that could do easily be so much better.

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You should change your browser settings to force-enable zooming on all sites.

Browsers shouldn't need a setting for this. Whoever decided to allow websites to disable zooming should be shot, along with whoever decided to allow them to disable copy/paste or hijack ctrl-f.

I genuinely think that there is no legitimate use case for disabled copy paste. It's just nonsense security theatre (which banks absolutely love)

There could be a modicum of use for it in some rare, rare cases, but the value provided in those cases is far outweighed by the value lost when it is prohibited.

You cannot prevent copy and paste. Particularly with things like reliable OCR in the photo app, like all iPhones have had for 2 or 3 years.

https://play.typeracer.com/ Here's your legitimate use case. Very fun, and also impossible without disabling copy-paste.

The site doesn't loads for me, but there is no need to disable copy/paste for such things.

Just track the paste operation and place a big red CHEATER banner on the username.

Also what can be disabled with javascript - can be enabled with javascript.

It's so weird to me that this initially became common with websites that were "optimized for iphones". Boggled my mind, since pinch-zooming was what made iPhones so cool initially

So true. Funny seeing people complain about sites that are not mobile friendly because they require pinch zooming. Pinch zoom is what makes sites like HN so much more mobile friendly than others!

Sites that disable zoom < sites that require zoom < all other sites

(I'm not really calling out HN here - its mobile experience is still better than most, although voting pretty much requires zoom)

I can't count the number of times I've accidentally flagged something and gone "aw hell" and had to track it back down to unflag it.

I think it's because pinch-to-zoom is actually terrible, although it has a cool name and looks cool. The problem is that it requires two points of contact to move apart, and you also have to hold the phone at the same time.

The best way to do it was screw-to-zoom, where you draw a spiral to zoom in or out; righty-tighty to zoom in, lefty-loosey to zoom out. "Screw-to-zoom" is a bit gross for marketing, though. Maybe "spiral-in, spiral-out"?

Requiring it to be usable is terrible. That said if images are important to the content, it's almost impossible without zoom to get a decent experience on a tiny screen.

user-scalable=no must be criminal!

You can try that, but then you get sites where stuff goes flying off the screen when you zoom. Honestly, it’s hard to believe that websites can be so poorly designed, but they are!

Is this possible on iOS? The only way I’ve seen is with a Javascript bookmarklet.

Honest question - does the browser in your phone. It have a simple UI for changing the font size?

On an iPhone you just tap an aA font icon in the URL bar and change the font size up or down from 100%.

If a restaurant wants you to use your phone and proceeds to serve a website that doesn't work on people's phones, that's on them, full stop. Even if the user can accommodate the brokenness, it's still unacceptable that they should ever have to.

Often the menu is an embedded PDF of uncertain origin that you can't really zoom in on, and font size increases does nothing.

Sure, and with physical menus you can bring along a magnifying glass for when they are printed too small. But then, this sort of things are not considered acceptable in the real world, why should we accept them in restaurant websites?

Does that actually change the font size or does it just zoom?

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