For reference the iPhone 4 had already been released, so mobile design was already a thing. The viewport meta tag wasn't a thing though, or at least not widespread as HTML5 release spec was finalized by W3C in 2014.

I did not see that the website was this old when I first saw it. Still, I've used websites from the 90s that worked better on mobile lol (I also used websites in 2023 that were awful, to be fair).

In a lot of ways 2010ish was about the worst for mobile web. Pages were huge and had tons of JavaScript, etc, but responsive design wasn’t a thing yet.

The viewport value for the meta element was never a part of HTML 5.

Apple first invented it for the iPhone 1, published it in 2007, and other manufacturers of mobile browser then copied it.

https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Ap...

At the time for iPhone 4 the viewport meta thingy was an old thing, but of course a lot of websites hadn’t updated in the previous four years.

The CSS Working Group has for some years specs in preparation which would make the viewport thingy official:

https://drafts.csswg.org/css-viewport/#viewport-meta