Microblog Entry: 2024-12-25

Pinch to zoom

Pinch to zoom on mobile web browsers is broken - or: why people with poor eyesight (me) do not enjoy surfing on small screen devices.

Today, most web sites are built "responsive" or "mobile first". Hooray! ... this basically results in side-by-side content being broken up and placed one after in a way it is consumable another by vertically scrolling / dragging. This might suffice for you hawkeyed 20-somethings being able to read 6px fonts on a high-dpi 5-inch screen, but I need to crank up my "accessibility settings" to maximum in order to read without glasses.

And here are two problems:

• my eyesight varies a lot depending on daytime (worst early morning / late evening)
• the "baseline" font size of web sites is not standardized - so some sites texts are way too small, some are huge.

Again: Phone (or browser zoom) settings to the rescue! ... but have you ever tried changing these multiple times a day or depending which site you are on? A nightmare. Slow and/or hidden deep within the menu structure.

Thus, I usually resort to pinch and zoom (and dragging the screen), like this:

=> GIF animation: pinch to zoom Wikipedia site on mobile (12MB)

Very inefficient. Slow. I dislike it. A lot. Even worse: Some sites disable this function!

Venturing out into the small web, I stumbled upon the marvellous Gemini browser "Lagrange". One of its best features is the "pinch to font zoom" function:

=> GIF animation: pinch to font-zoom in the Language Gemini browser (20MB)

... and this solves just everything! I really wish normal web browsers would implement - or at least offer such a thing.

Links

=> Gemini browser (html site) | About the Small Web (Gemini)

Comments

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