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I absolutely 100% hate, hate, hate mobile-optimized design sites, particularly ones that disable zooming. Up until now, I've done pretty well spoofing a desktop user agent to get the full pages, but with the advent of responsive design, it seems like more and more sites are feeling comfortable using viewport meta-tags to set user-scalable to false, which means that I am in effect forced into using the horrible mobile sites.

From what I understand, viewport tags are ignored by desktop browsers - is there a browser on Android which does the same thing, preventing web sites from removing key functionality from my phone? Maybe a Dolphin add-on?

I think potentially a greasemonkey script excising the offending viewport tags would also work, but I'm not sure there's a stable version of greasemonkey for android yet, and it might be preferable if the browser itself were built to always allow zooming.

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  • I would really like this aswell - a chrome or firefox extension would be nice.
    – Hamish Downer
    Mar 25, 2014 at 17:45
  • Is this question about text wrapping (fitting) when zooming? (the meaning of "viewport metatag parameters user-scalable" escapes me).
    – cipricus
    May 6, 2019 at 7:42

4 Answers 4

Reset to default
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Just found the setting in Chrome. If you go to Settings -> Accessibility and then tick the option "Force enable zoom" then you should be able to zoom in on any site. (I have read a few sites still manage to stop you, but the vast majority should then work).

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  • as far as i can tell Android Chrome is not yet able (in 2019) to wrap (fit) text when zooming
    – cipricus
    May 6, 2019 at 7:34
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UC Browser already has capability of forced zoom on mobile sites - and not only that, but the possibility of automatic text wrap when zooming. As far as I know, it's the only browser to have this behavior. Plus, with hardware acceleration browsing is just smooth on low specs smartphones, like I have :)

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  • Click the settings button (which looks like 3 horizontal lines in the bottom left corner), Click Settings, Click "Font Size & Page Layout", select "Force Webpages to Zoom". I also had to select "Enhanced Page Layout" too otherwise UCB would resize the image to full screen an no larger. That doesn't work when you're trying to read text from an image.
    – Tom Cerul
    Nov 13, 2014 at 14:20
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In Firefox mobile and derivatives (IceCat, Nightly, anything else based on "Fennec"), you can make it ignore the 'user-scalable' tag by toggling the preference browser.ui.zoom.force-user-scalable in about:config to true.

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  • 2
    Only works to enable zooming in, not for broken pages that wrap text outside the screen boundaries and don't allow zooming out or scrolling.
    – Ben
    Jan 5, 2019 at 16:07
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    This is true, unfortunately. Not sure how best to fix that.
    – Wyatt Ward
    Jan 12, 2019 at 5:58
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You can use Chrome or Opera Mobile.They Support Zooming the web pages

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    It's not whether they support zooming web pages, it's whether they will ignore the viewport metatag parameters user-scalable. Many sites can be zoomed, but the web designers have the option to disable that using a meta viewport tag, for some stupid reason. This applies to Chrome, Dolphin and the standard browser at the very least.
    – Paul
    Dec 25, 2013 at 3:57

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