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Comment by deepuj | Hacker News Reader

Y U no responsive design?

There are plenty of people who dislike responsive designs for good reasons. It is not the fault of responsive designs itself but the fault of many mobile browsers like Mobile Safari and Chrome for iOS. Here is what I mean:

Responsive websites usually don't let you zoom in by panning. Everything is fixed. If you want the text to be larger you are out of luck on the browsers mentioned above. On iOS you cannot make the font size bigger in Mobile Safari. You can only turn on zooming in the accessibility settings which has its drawbacks as well. I like to zoom in to the relevant parts of a website myself - manually.

If most mobile browsers were capable of letting the user pick a different font size then I would be all for it.

Disabling zoom is done independently of CSS RWD, and should generally be avoided for the accessibility reasons you state. Preferring zoom-and-pan to scrolling is a separate issue, but I haven't seen or heard much to indicate its a common sentiment.

It sounds like what you dislike is poorly done RWD, which only addressed the aesthetic of the small viewport and not the unique navigation & content challenges (unfortunately common).

Disabling user scaling (zooming) is a choice made by the website itself and not by the browser. So even though it is a bad usability-wise, it cannot be regarded as a problem with responsive web design.

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