> the iOS 10 beta introduced some new behavior where WebKit ignores the user-scalable viewport meta property. This "feature" is supposed to be for accessibility reasons; anyone should be able to pinch to zoom any web page. That's fine and all, but this would completely and totally break most webview-based apps.
This. I don't read a lot of outcry over this for unknown reasons. It baffles me. Apple essentially broke all web based apps and not many people seem to care.
That's because users are actually happy with the fact that they can now read websites with readable text size instead of being locked into whatever the 20/20 eyesight designer thought they should read.
It was a huge problem and this made life easier for a lot of users, significantly more than there are webapp users affected by this out there.
Why isn't it nasty that you can't pinch to zoom in all apps? What makes web sites which declare they have been laid out for a small screen just like an app different?
Part of the answer is that the App Store review process checks for sufficient text size. Web pages aren't subject to this process, and so are more likely to have overly small text. Certainly that's been my experience as a user.
I'm with millstone. I've never had that issue with an actual app.
Maybe that's because of app review, maybe it's the system defaults, it just isn't an issue.
I don't think I ever had an issue with a webpage that seemed purposful. It always seemed to be something they were trying to do for the desktop (perhaps not a great idea there) that was a disaster on mobile. Or maybe they tested on an iPad and when the screen is 4" instead of 10" it's unusable.
Heh, I've had the opposite experience. Generally sites that completely ignore mobile are manageable on the phone, maybe I have to scroll around a bit but its not a big deal. Mobile specific sites however seem to "break" (or at least annoy me) spectacularly and frequently.
If I press the menu and your menu takes over the entire screen, seemingly like a new page, the back button should close the menu, not navigate off your site, especially if there's no way to close the menu other than navigating to a link. Floating elements that take up 20% of an already small screen with absolutely nothing useful on them and no way to get rid of them are broken. Redirecting a non-mobile link to the home page of your mobile site instead of to the content the link actually points to is pretty common too.
In general I HATE mobile sites because they're usually less useful than the real desktop site or break things like reader mode. I'm especially FOND of sites that try to implement their own gestures thus messing up scrolling or the system gestures. That means YOU imgur.
But I've never seen an app present me with the equivalent of 3pt text by default.
Blogger is the worst example. I'm basically unable to scroll an article without it interpreting it as a swipe, sending me to a different page, and losing my progress.
Because it's an expected feature of the web that has been in every browser since at least IE 3. If anything it is nasty that you can't pinch and zoom in apps, because there's no really good reason not to have it.
That said I prefer my text smaller, have my phone at the smallest font size and rarely zoom in on text. I also wish there was a "remove the pointless whitespace" option and that other ui elements got smaller along with the text, but I'm rambling.
I think this is something where webpages people open in safari and web-technology based apps people install as a little icon on their phone should probably be treated differently. I have run into unintended zooming as an app usability disaster as well.
It's great if there is text to read. It sucks if you built an HTML5 gesture-based game and pinching just zooms you into the middle of a <canvas> showing already-blown-up pixel art.
I agree this was a necessary step, and understand apple's justified aversion to adding more options/switches for their users, but maybe the website could pop up something that asked the users for permission to make the viewport unresizable?
Why outcry? I wasn't aware of the change, but if I had been, I'd have applauded Apple. Blocking zoom on web pages was super annoying, and I'm not sure why it was allowed in the first place.
This functionality change affects web apps running within Safari. If you care about accessibility on the web, you're likely to view this as a feature rather than a bug.
If you're building a "native" app that happens to uses web views as an implementation detail, as in this article, Apple explicitly exposes a property in the WKWebView API to revert to the former behavior. See: https://developer.apple.com/reference/webkit/wkwebview/14149...
I love news sites that think a tiny window with a couple of video bobble heads commenting on something they're clueless about is content absolutely everyone must see. Whether they want to or not.
They never saw it as the future. Jobs just didn't want to give up control and they didn't want to release the real API too early as it was probably in serious flux.
I'm sure if web apps worked Jobs would hav been happy to leave it there. He was against iTunes on Windows, the move that made the iPod what it was.
It was in a flux. Dig back to look at the then remove brine headers to see the mess that the API was. It improved significantly for the official / iphoneos 2.0 release.
This. I don't read a lot of outcry over this for unknown reasons. It baffles me. Apple essentially broke all web based apps and not many people seem to care.