653947 - Allowing websites to disable zoom via viewport meta-tag is a usability issue.

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Firefox for Android Graveyard :: Panning/Zooming, defect)

Description

[CoJaBo]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux i686; rv:2.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/4.0
Build Identifier: 4.0.1

There needs to be an option or pref to override this, or Firefox should just ignore it outright by default.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
Go to http://fukung.net/random (or some other mobile site that disables zoom)
Try to zoom to read text/images

Comment 1

[Martijn Wargers (dead)]

Some time ago I filed bug 561202. That bug is a little more broad than this one, but probably basically the same.

Comment 2

[Matt Brubeck (:mbrubeck)]

I'm planning to write a Fennec add-on to add an option to ignore "user-scalable=no" and always allow zooming.  That might be a good place to experiment with any UI changes that could eventually be included in the browser.  I'll post an update here when the add-on is ready.

Comment 3

[Matt Brubeck (:mbrubeck)]

I agree that users should have an option to force zooming, but I think we still want to let pages disable zooming to support these use cases:

- Web pages must be able to override pinch zooming if they want to use multi-touch gestures for other purposes (for example, pinch to zoom a map in a web page, or a multi-touch painting app or game).

- Web pages must be able to override double-tap zooming if they want to respond to taps quickly, or to allow users to tap rapidly for other reasons (e.g. games).

when bug 603008 is fixed, then both these cases will be possible with touch events.  Maybe then we should encourage pages to use touch events and preventDefault to disable zooming, rather than "user-scalable=no".

Comment 5

[Wesley Johnston (:wesj)]

For anyone looking, this was fixed in bug 707571. The pref is:

browser.ui.zoom.force-user-scalable