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Comment by qnleigh | Hacker News Reader

Why do so many websites disable pinch-to-zoom for mobile users? This page is full of interesting close-up photos, but at least on my Android phone, I can't zoom in to see any of the details. Who benefits from disabling this feature?

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That's something you can override in the accessibility options, both in Chrome and in Firefox.

IMHO, it should be the default, I have never been in a situation where it caused a problem, but I have been in plenty of situations where it helped.

Thank you. This is one of those things that annoyed me so much sometimes I would just leave the site.

A workaround: Long press on image, "open image in a new tab"

turning the desktop mode on in the browser always worked for me to bypass such limitations on the mobile browser. just tested it and the pinching and zooming works fine.

I am able to pinch to zoom fine on my iPhone

The issue seems to be with Chrome based browsers.

The website explicitly disables it; they have a viewport meta tag with:

    initial-scale=1.0, minimum-scale=1.0, maximum-scale=1.0, user-scalable=no

I think it's more likely Safari these days just ignores this, because of the very problem OP complained about.

Yeah, I actually think Safari has the right behavior here. I use zoom features all the time on all my devices.

I actually prefer pinch zoom than developers implementing accessibility features which often don’t test all hardware and get glitchy at certain zoom levels.

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