You're not alone - I hate it too. I always think this problem is easily solved as well. Since touch gestures can already account for "one finger or two". A two finger vertical gesture should refresh (because horizontal zooms), a one finger gesture should scroll.
Counter-Counter-Argument: Refreshing a page is probably as or less common as needing to zoom a page. Scrolling is far more common than needing to refresh a page. Breaking one-handed scrolling in order to allow for one-handed refreshing seems like a poor choice. Especially when my browser already has a built in refresh button that's easily accessible with one hand. My mobile browser does not, however, have a built in scroll-bar for one handed scrolling in the event a site breaks scrolling in favor of refreshing. In fact, since the scroll gesture is such a standard websites are often designed around not having a vertical scrollbar for mobile because it's pointless... that is, unless they break scrolling.
I find the concept convenient. I find the execution terrible.
You're mentioning something about zooming with two hands. I exclusively use one hand to browse, and I use double tap drag to zoom. The thing I find most annoying is moving my hand from the bottom of the screen up a bit to reach the navbar, whether to swipe to move to a newly opened tab, to close a tab, or to enter something in the url. Usually though, those actions only take place when I am "done" on a site, not in the middle of using the site, like refresh.
I have never accidently refreshed a page using Chrome's pull to refresh, and so I love it. Having said that, if a developer wanted to refresh part of a page using pull to refresh, they would have to be very careful that it is implemented well. This library seems to do it pretty well, and does not conflict with Chrome's pull to refresh.
Anyway, you made the argument that pull to refresh breaks scrolling. I strongly disagree.
I've seen some pretty shocking broken scrolling, but modals that prevent scrolling (and have js errors which prevent closing) are usually the cause. I've never see a "pull to anything" gesture break scrolling what-so-ever.
>I exclusively use one hand to browse, and I use double tap drag to zoom.
I also browse exclusively one handed, but not necessarily "one fingered". I grip my phone between my thumb and other three digits and use my index finger for any two finger gestures while my thumb is stationary. This allows me to pinch zoom with one hand. I do this because sites so frequently break one fingered gestures - not really "by choice" but "as a workaround".
Try doing the double tap zoom on the Reddit home page. You need to be highly selective of where you double tap, otherwise it treats it like a normal click and you're taken to a comments section, an article, or an external image/video. This is either a bug in Android's double tap timeout or with Reddit breaking the functionality. I can only double tap zoom if I'm very careful to tap in white space which effectively only exists after a title or between the "comments" and "..." (more options) items beneath each post.
>I've seen some pretty shocking broken scrolling, but modals that prevent scrolling (and have js errors which prevent closing) are usually the cause. I've never see a "pull to anything" gesture break scrolling what-so-ever.
I was frequently unable to scroll on Reddit mobile (not the app) because Reddit thinks I wanted to do a page refresh. It's enough of a problem that I simply didn't scroll back up anymore when browsing. It must have been a common enough issue because the gesture had been removed at some point.
