Google Chrome's Improved Page Zoom Should Help Make the Mobile Web More Accessible

Google Chrome's giving its page zoom feature a boost, which should make it more helpful for people who have difficulty reading the smaller screen on a phone. From a report: With the improved feature, you can increase the size of text, images, videos, and interactive controls on mobile web pages by up to 300 percent while preserving their original formatting. While the feature hasn't yet become available for all Chrome users, you can access it now if you download the Chrome beta on your phone or tablet. To enable the feature, tap the three dots icon in the top right corner of the browser, hit Settings > Accessibility, and then adjust the zoom level to your liking. Google will save this preference for all the sites you browse so you won't have to keep tweaking it, and will even bypass the ones that try to block zoom features. Previously, Google only allowed users to adjust text scaling options up to 200 percent.

Same as Desktop; I use Samsung browser

[aberglas]

Indeed, sounds just like desktop.

All the cool kids use their fingers to zoom in and then scroll around mobile way.

I use the Samsung browser, not chrome, because it has a desktop like zoom.

How about we simply return to the early 2000s

[dmomo]

And allow text to wrap appropriately when the size is increased instead of forcing us to slide the entire page left and right when we zoom in? There's a reason that effort is put in to make pages reactive and Chrome's current behavior undermines that.

Re:

[DontBeAMoran]

Surely you meant "responsive" web design instead of "reactive". The problem is that a lot of responsive websites are really badly coded, but Google's zoom fix will probably only make matters worse.

Re:

[dmomo]

I indeed meant responsive. Thank you for the clarification.

Wait, they are going back to an HTML web?

[Fly Swatter]

Because the whole point was to be able to use your own font and text sizes when browsing the web. But 'designers' have a completely different view that web pages should only appear as they want it down to the last pixel - it's at the point we might as well be served each page as an image.

Re: Wait, they are going back to an HTML web?

[Guru2Newbie]

And trying to print what one sees on the screen (WYSIWYP) is increasingly impossible without the browser generating multiple pages--both before and after--of crappy-formatted text. Good luck using an extension to manually edit the page before printing. I'm thinking an image might be better??

Re: Wait, they are going back to an HTML web?

[DontBeAMoran]

Most web shops don't make print versions of their websites. It's quite easy via stylesheets to even remove useless things from the print version, but I bet some of those web shops aren't even aware of the existence of print stylesheets.

Re:

[Known Nutter]

I bet some of those web shops aren't even aware of the existence of print stylesheets.

A sad and amusing commentary given the origin of the term 'stylesheet'.

Just let me pinch zoom

[rsilvergun]

without turning on "desktop site" and I'd be happy.

Opera on mobile does zoom right

[leptons]

Been using Opera on mobile for so many years, specifically because when I zoom in, it wraps the text within the space of my screen so I never have to scroll around to read something. It's so useful that I practically never use chrome on my phone. If Chrome mobile did this one simple trick, I'd use it, but Opera mobile is the only one that does it right and they've had this for at least a decade.

Re:

[PhantomHarlock]

I received a free 1st gen iPhone back in the day as part of a promotion. I remember the browser included with it (Safari?) auto-wrapped the text when you pinch zoomed, and nothing I've used since then did that. I use Firefox on android currently but I'll check out Opera if it has that much desired feature and I can still use ad blocking software. I don't understand why that feature hasn't caught on more widely. It never impacted the page formatting in a negative way, I was surprised at how well it wor

Re:

[piojo]

Agreed. This is such a crucial feature that instead of saying Opera Mobile particularly awesome, I say every other browser is unusable junk. They are like motorcycles that don't drive but are designed only to be carried in small trucks.

I don't care about zoom of mobile sites...

[dark.nebulae]

They're typically optimized for mobile and I can get by.

But sometimes I just need the full desktop site, and that's typically where chrome goes wonky on me. I wish that worked a lot better with respect to zoom...

Like Jira desktop view on mobile is just terrible in most cases.

Sounds great

[FudRucker]

But i still refuse to use anything by google on my iphone, the main reason i switched to iphone was to get away from google's datamining and spammy android,

Re: Sounds great

[ZERO1ZERO]

Doesnâ(TM)t chrome on ios just use safari anyway

Mobile sites that don't let you zoom

[Tony Isaac]

Many mobile versions of web sites won't let you zoom in at all if you're using a phone. It makes no sense, because often the text on these sites is so small that it's practically unreadable. How does it help anyone to lock the width to the phone's (tiny) screen width? At least with "dumb" (non-responsive) web sites, I can zoom in at will.

Re:

[piojo]

Opera Mobile can zoom almost every site, and it preserves layout. Chrome seems to be considering not sucking some time this year, but you can already have the Not Sucking web experience if you wish.