Best are the mobile friendly pages that don't allow you to pinch-zoom while the desktop version does.

I'm disproportionately enraged by this.

Plus, if there is wasted space, you can jam an ad in there.

I permanently use desktop mode on my phone browser

same here. also your username is amusing :)

I wouldn't do it permanently, but I use the feature sometimes myself.

Some sites disabled pinch zooms (massively frustrating for images). Some sites exclude information in mobile view. I'm sure there's other reasons too.

Facebook, Reddit and Amazon all have terribly made mobile versions of their sites, for example.

Reddit's is comically bad, like they hired interns to make it who tried trendy stuff but didn't understand how to implement any of it properly.

I recently found an option in mobile Chrome "Settings > Accessibility > Force enable zoom" which overrides a website's request to prevent zooming in. Highly recommended

Yes, very useful. You can do the same on Firefox for Android: "Settings > Accessibility > Zoom on all websites."

> Reddit's is comically bad, like they hired interns to make it who tried trendy stuff but didn't understand how to implement any of it properly.

I think it's intentionally bad. They just want to force you to use the app instead. Hence the 5 times a minute "Reddit is better in the app" popups too. Unfortunately the real reason of course is "Reddit can collect much more information about you if you use the app". It's not about "being better". That's a choice, if they wanted to provide a phenomenal web app experience they could easily do so.

sure, but all the time? You guys must have ant vision or something :) . Sometimes I use it but it's pretty rare.

I recently hit that 40's age where short sight vision is now stuffed. I foresee a future of phone use frustration.

Amusingly, I use my phone to magnify the labels for food ingredients to make sure myself or my kid aren't eating problem foods.

It is amazing how many years people live after their 40's and so much stuff is now "hard" and yet no one will design for it. Even when they themselves will inevitably suffer from it one day.

Aging and death is an abstract concept to youth, for the most part. Source: I've been there.

There are some apps which you can use to scan labels with and it will tell you which allergens does it have.

I use Opera because it perfectly scales the text when I zoom in, as opposed to other browsers.

> I wouldn't do it permanently, but I use the feature sometimes myself.

Exactly my thought. I too use it sometimes, but "always" is a bit too much.

> Some sites disabled pinch zooms (massively frustrating for images).

Best are the blogs that have embedded images of graphs or something and they are as large as you can make them (edge to edge). Try pinch to zoom... nope. Tap on image... Here is a smaller version of the image (not edge to edge). Oooookay... Can I zoom now? Hahahhahah....nope!

> Some sites disabled pinch zooms

I've always wondered why sites do this. What's the point of it? What does the web designer get from it?

double tap zoom is annoying. it is easy to imagine inexperienced users getting lost because of it.

Because it's objectively better. I also exclusively use desktop mode, and I can tell when a site's designer can't comprehend this choice.

>site's designer can't comprehend this choice.

I've built responsive sites that work as you'd expect in desktop mode, and I'm not 100% certain how other sites that don't are built.

They seem to degrade into some odd hybrid between desktop and mobile. It's like the worst of both worlds.

So, for example, you get hamburger menus, instead of the full desktop nav. And you get a different layout with an increased PPI, but it's not quite mobile and not quite desktop.

I can only assume that they are looking at the agent string in addition to implementing media queries / breakpoints. But there's also something weird going on with the PPI.

Whatever it is, seems like it takes more effort to create a poorer design.

  Every "mobile friendly" menu site is able to show maybe 5 items on the page at once

This is due to accessibility regulations. Apple design guidelines and Material guidelines explicitly state how small font can and should be. Ask any designer you know.

Not necessarily; WCAG doesn’t actually mandate a minimum font size, only that your fonts respect the user zoom and font size settings.

But is it right to punish everyone else because of accessibility reasons?

Is it right that I was downvoted heavily for stating a fact?

No, that is not right at all.

My phone has a text size setting, and if I needed bigger text for readability I could set it - why can't we have that conveyed as a user preference somehow?

You just said it yourself. Your phone provides that preference. But a good default is essential, and given to us based on Apple and Googles research, which was probably actually done by Nielsen Norman Group

I'm glad my betters dictate what can be done.

No, there are physical limits, and those are the ones determining mobile screens.