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Comment by astrange | Hacker News Reader

That's actually a different kind of scaling. The one at issue here is closer to cmd-plus/minus on desktop browsers, or two-finger zooming on phones. It's hard to make that look good unless you only have simple flat UIs like the one on this website.

They did make another attempt at it for apps with Dynamic Type though.

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I'm certain that web style scaling is what the vast majority of desktop users actually want from fractional desktop scaling.

Thinking that two finger zooming style scaling is the goal is probably the result of misguided design-centric thinking instead of user-centric thinking.

> misguided design-centric thinking

More like “let the device driver figure it out” - Apple is after all a hardware company first.

In terms of how its business works, Apple is primarily a fashion company.

A deeply technical one, yes, but that's not what drives their decision making.

At the time I was trying and failing to get Java apps to do it properly, so please send this feedback to whoever invented Swing in the 90s.

User scale and device scale are combined into one scale factor as far as the layout / rendering engine is concerned and thus are solved in the same way.

The difference is developers are a lot more likely to have tested one than the other. So it's what you call a binary compatibility issue.

Similarly browser developers care deeply if they break a website with the default settings, but they care less if cmd-+ breaks it because that's optional. If it became a mandatory accessibility feature somehow, now they have a problem.

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