So what?

His complaint is easily verifiable, and valid:

<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0, maximum-scale=1.0,user-scalable=0">

I jumped on this bandwagon long back for preventing horizontal scrollbars and other issues. Is there an updated advice for allowing zoom and being responsive?

“Allowing zoom” and “being responsive” are not two states at odds with one another.

Preventing zooming is a serious accessibility issue and it makes the content worse for every user.

If you’re properly setting responsive widths, a large enough base font size, large enough input text size, and using border-box for box-sizing, things should just work except for cases where you’re absolutely positioning things or telling them not to word wrap and they are wider than the viewport.

There really is no bandwagon to jump onto here—most sites don’t prevent zooming in. Many that do were just misconfigured from the start, and because some popular mobile browsers ignore `maximum-scale=1.0`, the issue isn’t normally identified.

Quick tip: Make sure all of your inputs are at least 16px font size. This will prevent most mobile browsers from “automatically” zooming in when an input is focused ;) Which is a common reason people employ the maximum-scale property.