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Android viewport setting "user-scalable=no" breaks width / zoom level of viewport
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Closed 8 years ago.
I'm having some problems getting my website to scale correctly for mobile devices.
We have a site that's designed to be a minimum width of 640px, maximum of whatever. I have the meta tag currently:
<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width;minimum-scale=0.5,maximum-scale=1.0; user-scalable=1;" />
Now - The part i'm confused about is that if I use "initial-scale=1.0", obviously the site will scale 1:1, and it will look crappy on an iphone 3Gs (will only see half the site). Now, on an Iphone 4, (having a 640px wide resolution) it will be scaled properly at 640px if I use "initial-scale=1.0".
Alternately, if the graphics are 480px, 3Gs would require scale=.667 and iOS 4 would require 1.3, correct?
So how do you get the site to fit perfectly edge to edge? Can the browser detect the device width and then set the scale accordingly?? There are lots of different device widths out there... android, older iphones, blackberry's etc.
Getting quite frusterated :( Feel like i'm missing something important that I should already know.
Edit It seems that the 'initial-scale' meta tag should be scaling the site relative to the viewport, then using width=device-width to set the actual viewport size.
The problem I seem to be having is that the viewport isn't scaling to fit the device, it's staying at 640px no matter what tag I use. What am I missing here???
I think the main issue with the original message is that semi-colons don't appear to work on iPhone 4+. It only works with commas as separators (or only the device-width setting). Other browsers seem to be more tolerant.
The following works reliably for me:
<meta name="viewport"
content="width=device-width,initial-scale=1,maximum-scale=1" />
You'll also want to disable the body and document from scrolling horizontally:
body, html
{
overflow-x: hidden;
}
Good link for more info on Mozilla Site:
https://developer.mozilla.org/en/Mobile/Viewport_meta_tag
"width" is to tell the browser how wide your website is at 100% zoom. if you have designed your website to be fluid, you could specify "device-width" here, and the browser won't need to use any zooming, as your layout is designed to fit any viewport width.
"initial-scale" is for overriding the default behaviour of some devices to zoom in or out on your website so that the website width (which you specified above) matches the screen width. setting this to 1 basically says "don't zoom for this, use scroll bars if my website is too wide for the screen, and leave blank space at the sides if it's too narrow". if you do want your website to fill the screen width exactly, don't use initial-scale.
Ok, i've figured it out... essentially.
Because my design is actually 2x the size of the viewport (sort of), the key is just to use "initial scale = 0.5". It works correctly on both devices (3Gs and 4), and more or less correctly on android devices, etc.
Kind of tricky, and it seems like there should be a better way to do this, but for the time being, it works.
Thanks all who provided input.
I believe that the answer is that you want to tell the web browser to always scale the site to 640 pixels. I would even turn off the ability for users to scale the site so that stray drags don't re-size everything.
Try this:
<meta name="viewport" content="width=640; user-scalable=no;" />
Related
I am working on a website right know, but I have a weird issue with the view on mobile devices.
When I resize the window on a desktop browser the elements and fonts are changing with the viewport how they should.
When I open the website on a mobile device all fonts and elements (e.g. the burger menu) are way to small. It looks like it is a scaling issue or something similar.
I have the meta viewport tag in the head so that is not the issue.
I couldn't find any similar questions here or on any other forum. I hope somebody can help.
I have attached some screenshots, but if necessary I can provide the URL.
Thank you in advance.
Full Screen Window
Resized Window
Responsive example 1
Resposive example 2
Make sure to include responsive meta tag to insure that your browser gets the right width of your device instead of zooming out the page
<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1">
This means that the browser will (probably) render the width of the
page at the width of its own screen. So if that screen is 320px wide,
the browser window will be 320px wide, rather than way zoomed out and
showing 960px (or whatever that device does by default, in lieu of a
responsive meta tag).
Further reading Here
I am facing a problem on this particular page. http://staging.creativewritingagency.com/contact-us.php
Now, this is not a responsive website. The client only requires that he should be able to view the complete page (without zooming in or out on the mobile screen) in first view. Later, he would pinch in and out to view and read the text.
So I did a bit of research and found that this can be done using viewport meta tag. I inserted the following code to <head> section
<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0, user-scalable=yes">
As per my knowledge, this code should
set the width of webpage to device width
set initial zoom level at 1.
let the user perform zoom actions
However, this code seems to be working only on Chrome for Android. Safari browser on iPhone 6 Plus is still displaying full page. Here's a screenshot of what I see on emulated iPhone 6 Plus on Browserstack. http://prntscr.com/81vs1n
Could someone please look into it and point where I may be doing things the incorrect way.
P.S. This is my first question on Stack Overflow. I am open to suggestions on improving the questioning format.
EDIT - Width of my web page is 1170px.
The width=device-width is the issue.
It can be set to a specific number of pixels like width=600 or to the special value device-width value which is the width of the screen in CSS pixels at a scale of 100%.
The width of the viewport in pixels. The default is 980. The range is from 200 to 10,000.
https://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/Mozilla/Mobile/Viewport_meta_tag
https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/documentation/AppleApplications/Reference/SafariWebContent/UsingtheViewport/UsingtheViewport.html
Set fixed width in meta tag not according to device.
So I stumbled upon this link while reading more about viewport. Today I learned that viewport is used to normalize the built in zoom behavior.
Thanks #subodh for pointing me in that direction.
Now, I have updated my meta tag to read like this and it works like a charm.
<meta name="viewport" content="width=1180">
EDIT - Forgot to mention, I removed initial-scale from my actual code. It was causing the page to zoom to 100% original pixels, as a result of which, it had to be scrolled horizontally.
I'm making a prototype sight currently that is static (as in when the screen is resized smaller such as 480 pixels the sight does not responsively adjust its elements ). I actually don't want the sight to be responsive I want it to behave as apple.com does. Apples site is a large zoomed out overview of the site allowing the user to zoom in on what he/she wishes to. Whenever my sight is loaded on my iphone it is zoomed in to a tip corner of the site. When I apply zoom:.5 to the css it zooms out just as much as i would like it to in IE and chrome but does not in Firefox. Obviously that's a major problem being firefox is a very popular browser and i am having difficulties finding an alternative. If any one could offer any amount of alternatives (even using javascript) it would be much appreciated.
If I understand you correctly, you need to set the viewport meta.
Add the following to the head section of your site:
<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0"/>
This will set the initial zoom to fit the entire page, while allowing users to zoom as they please.
this is quite easy...
just do all your code in old fashioned pixel measurements
and nothing will resize and it wont be responsive at all
We are looking at an existing (non-responsive) site whose width is 1230 or so. So on mobile devices its content, even compressed as it is, loses about 10% off to the right.
That's bad, as their phone number (plenty large enough to see, even compressed on a mobile) is right aligned and we lose some of the digits unless the viewer scrolls across.
As a quick stop-gap remedy I figured we could set:
<meta name="viewport" content="width=1235">
But that's ignored on the phone I'm testing with.
I've checked that the phone responds to a much lower viewport width - if I set it to 300 or something than I get zoomed in content (top left hand corner), as you'd expect. Just it doesn't respond to a viewport set beyond 1024.
Remember, the viewport is an effective screen size for mobile devices. The idea is that since your website isn't responsive, it doesn't do any good. The problem lies in your CSS rather.
But yes, you can set the viewport higher than 1024. Generally, the viewport should be slightly wider than your web content to make sure you have a little bit of margin next to your text for readability.
Have a look at this Introduction to Viewports.
Don't forget to use this along with media queries to achieve responsiveness. I usually use this and it works for me across a range of mobile devices. You don't have to hardcode content width though.
<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1">
But as I mentioned earlier, the problem lies with your CSS positioning and the viewport tag isn't the solution. You can probably do a media query to reduce size of the phone number.
I'm in the process of building a support page for my pre application.
I'm having a problem where the content on the page is very small, so the user has to manually zoom in to read it.
I've made the page so that there is nothing very wide or tall, but for some reason everything is very "zoomed out" when you first navigate there on the Pre.
I've noticed that sites like wikipedia have versions that are perfectly optimized for the Pre. How can I make my pages start out "full-sized" the way wikipedia does?
Update:
The extremely simple page that I am currently testing with.
On the above page I have tried setting the width for every element to both 310px and to 100%, the result is always the same.
I figure I can accomplish this by giving everything a static width and then making everything use a very big font size. I'm just guessing that there is a "better way", i.e. some way to let the pre browser know that it doesn't need to start zoomed out to the size of a "normal" web page (it seems that the default zoom is about 1024px wide, even though the actual rez is 320px).
I found out the proper way to do this on the webOSDev forums.
The following should be in the header:
<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width"/>
<meta name="viewport" content="initial-scale = 1.0"/>
This has the advantage that when the user turns the device into landscape mode, everything scales appropriately, without any styling gymnastics.
Posting a URL of a problem page would be a big help here.
In general, to show nicely on smartphones, the design of the page has to be "fluid" (taking 100% of the width in percent - not specified in pixels) to use the most space in differing screen resolutions. The minimal width supported by the design should be about 300 pixels, to fit without zooming on 320x480 screens.