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Comment by lmm | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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

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.

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

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.

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.

user-scalable=no must be criminal!

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