That's just a stupid choice made by (so many) web developers. I checked a sampling of my own sites with Google's tool and they all passed as mobile friendly, but none of them disable zooming. (HN fails, of course.)
javascript:m=document.querySelector('meta%5Bname=viewport%5D');m.content=m.content.replace(/.*(width=%5B%5E,%5D+).*/,%22$1,maximum-scale=10,minimum-scale=0.1,user-scalable=1%22);
javascript:m=document.querySelector('meta%5Bname=viewport%5D');m.content=%22width=1024,maximum-scale=10,minimum-scale=0.1,user-scalable=1%22;HM doesn't disable zoom, it just displays in a teeny tiny font.
Sometimes it's stupid, sometimes not. Disabling zoom removes the 300ms delay added to most interactions on mobile devices [1]. You can alternatively use fastclick.js [2] or swiftclick.js [3], but that's an extra lib/http request to load.
[1] http://updates.html5rocks.com/2013/12/300ms-tap-delay-gone-a...
<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width">
FF says this issue is "RESOLVED FIXED", so maybe they implemented it too:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=941995
I have that meta tag on all my sites and I just tested on Android and iOS: Clicking on links and other controls seem instant. And zoom works. Hurray!
"<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width">"
EDIT: Actually I also include the initial-scale as in the comment below.
<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0">I know only lip-service is paid towards accessibility but zoom shouldn't be able to be disabled except by the user.
I've always been a fan of moving mobile web towards the standards and behaviors of native apps which generally did not require zooming to get tasks done.
Generally I welcome it, because I can click on the teeeny input field and have it come "closer" to me for editing then get out of the way.
Maybe my phone is just a little zealous with the zooming, but it loves to zoom into the top-left corner of the textarea. The first thing I do uses three pinches' worth to zoom back out, and if I ever have to move the cursor and thus touch into the textarea again, it zooms in again.
I think with ios 8 this has changed.
Due to that low screen real estate there is an extreme amount of scrolling down, whenever you need that header to navigate you end up needing to scroll a long way to the top.
Links from the bottom are easily forgotten about when you're half or 80% of the way through an article. Likewise follow you around widgets are a painful annoyance 100% of the time.
I still find that very annoying. Sometimes I have to scroll up and find that damn thing covering part of my screen again.
Fortunately I have a bookmarklet that zaps all the position:fixed elements to static :) It works brilliantly in 99.9% of the cases :)
I actually have the opposite opinion, that the mobile wikipedia version is much better-designed and intuitive. I prefer the mobile version on desktop.
Worst. UX. Ever.
Why aren't the sections already opened by default? Why aren't there any images? My phone out-performs desktops from just a few years back. I don't need this super-minimalist wikipedia. I just need something that's slightly more responsive because I don't have the horizontal space to handle all of its columns properly.
If sections are all expanded, one has to scroll an unknown distance to get to the section one is interested in. If sections were to expanded by default, it would probably be better to not make them collapsable at all and instead include in the mobile layout the table of contents found in the desktop layout. However the table of contents uses anchor links which may be less usable in a mobile context (easier to lose your sense of place, a user's desire to not click links that may load a new page for performance and/or bandwidth reasons).
I agree that an "expand all" option would be a useful addition, I didn't follow the link in another post that presumably explains why one isn't being added.
User: This doesn't work on your mobile site, why don't you just give me your desktop site because it works better?
Mobile web site dev: We can't do that on mobile because X.
User: But X is already a solved problem on the existing site.
Mobile web site dev: Sorry, but we need to do a mobile site.
Collapsibility means requiring high-precision clicking, instead of low-precision sweeping of the finger.
I see your point in general, but even the average user browses Wikipedia often enough to realize they're always in-page links. If only by accident, I hit the wrong link often enough :)
Thankfully in andorid's chrome you can actually turn off the zoom lock for all websites in the accessibility settings.
I think it has to do with a kind of counter-purpose development where the people who create the devices are trying to create a good experience on websites and the designers of websites keep moving the goalposts.
Perhaps it's time that web designers are subject (or subject themselves) to a similar set of human interface guidelines that app developers are subject to, for instance.
I would love to replace web pages with an RSS reader type program that just displays content and navigation in a legible format.
But with all the fancy stuff that's being added on and on, it seems like the best we're going to get is browsers with a reading "try to unfuck the formatting" button once you've gotten to the content you want.
I guess the problem is our attention economy. As a designer your job is to hold attention, and this drives design trends so far from competitors that usability suffers.
Although we do see that people love the uniformity of the big social networks. I find Twitter's clean timeline much more helpful than visiting individual websites.
I wonder if we'll continue to see a trend of the web separated into app-level experiences & information silos. I'm thinking there's a big void in the market for something like squarespace meets tumblr.
In my opinion, all sites should be usable like this. Styles and scripts should merely be enhancements, not requirements.
I'm beginning to wonder if we shouldn't split the Internet into two - one for cloud apps and another for content - and design the tech stacks accordingly.
An unusable webapp frustrates users and drives them off, but an informational page trying to be some kind of 1920's prediction of a futuristic interactive magazine is annoying at most. I can always figure out how to read the text, so I just put up with the stupid design.
As much as I agree, many sites are not usable like this :(
And there are aspects of CSS that I do want to keep, like making the navigation lists properly horizontal (and in some cases, nested with hovers). Without CSS, you sometimes have to scroll through several pages of expanded out header/navigation before you find the content.
On the other points I think it's because a lot of companies are still treat their mobile UX as an afterthought, even the ones who wouldn't like to admit it. It's a lot of work to handle all the variables well and few are willing to commit the resources in the right places early enough to implement a good mobile experience without awkward technical workarounds later.
This sort of thinking leads to sites highly tailored for mobile that ignores a segment of their audience.
Specifically, mobile-friendly typically disables zoom, so that zooming can't be used to choose text size or to scroll through the page at a higher rate. Instead, everything is reduced to a kind of very long ticker-tape, where if you're deep into the page, you need to scroll many, many times to get anywhere.
Alternatively, you get a page broken up into expandable sections, like mobile wikipedia, where it's very tedious to visually scan the page. Wikipedia is one of the best examples of a site where I prefer the desktop page on mobile.
Another issue is limited functionality. Sites with complex forms typically present a hobbled or otherwise limited, basic mobile experience.