I think my biggest frustration is when there is a pop up designed to go to the center of your screen. This never works properly in a phone browser, making it impossible to either close or even view the pop up. I just give up and don't even try to get the content anymore.
I think this happened because people started copy/pasting the following meta tag in to their HTML, thinking they were adding better support for mobile safari, and not fully understanding what it does.
Really you should only consider adding this element if your site is optimised for mobile, either through a responsive design or with a dedicated mobile site, and even then maximum-scale=1 is usually a bad idea.
Agreed, this is why I prefer desktop rendering on my phone, because most 'mobile' sites feel like 2003 blackberry sites. iPhones and other modern smartphones can read read regular html pages fine.
So wrong. And its like - we know better how big letters you can read. You don't. I zoom almost all sites on my iphone, on 13" mac and on my work's 27" imac. Its all the same - I need at least some font increase to read it comfortably, because every time I sit on different distance from the screen. Or I maybe need glasses (although my doctor does not seems to think so).
While it is inexcusable to do this as a web developer, there is a layout bug in Mobile Safari to which this is the easiest and sometimes only solution. The designers aren't disabling zooming because they hate people who zoom, just because they're inconsiderate of them.
What is more annoying is that using an Android device, which doesn't have this bug, you suddenly can't zoom either. Now that this is fixed in iOS, it will take a long while for sites to re-enable it. It's very unfortunate that web developers needed to disable features on all platforms to work around a bug in one.
Thanks. I think I've run into that before (as a user), but just didn't think about it. Seems better to just make the user zoom back out than to disable zooming altogether, in any case.
I don't understand the hatred people level at mobile sites that do not let you zoom when contrasted with the lack of hatred for mobile apps, which almost uniformly do not let you zoom.
Surely there's a special ring in Hell for those web anti-designers.