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This post is part of my Today I learned series in which I share all my web development learnings.

I read the pkk's article user-scalable=no and suppressing zoom suppression and learned that browsers implement an accessibility feature to always allow zooming on a web page.

Why would a responsive web site disallow zoom in the first place? I'm always annoyed when I can't zoom into web content because the web site developer decided to put the following meta element in the HTML.

<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width,user-scalable=no">

It turns out that you can overwrite this behavior and make zooming possible in many Android browsers (Chrome, Edge, Samsung Internet and UC). The only downside is that it's hidden in the browsers' accessibility settings.

Table showing how to enable and force zooming in several browsers

But hey, that's good news! I went into these settings right away and can now zoom into Twitter on my phone; that's a good thing! If you're interested in a deep-dive into the topic, give pkk's article a read.

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About Stefan Judis

Frontend nerd with over ten years of experience, freelance dev, "Today I Learned" blogger, conference speaker, and Open Source maintainer.

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