initial-scale=1 actually desirable? I’m undecided. I don’t think it’s cut and dried in either direction, but taking all things into account I’m still leaning toward recommending it.I think your first point is the most useful one, but the unfortunate reality I’ve seen is that people don’t tend to notice these things even when they’re obvious, sometimes because authoring is normally done on non-mobile devices and why would they open their own article on a mobile device when they’ve already read it because they wrote it?, and sometimes because people are stunningly blind to such things.
Foregoing it provides a better experience, doesn’t hide content? Honestly not at all convinced.
When it’s a pervasive layout issue, a lot of developers will never be able to figure out why it’s happening, even with browsers providing that sort of rendering as they fortunately do these days (in the past mobile size adjustment things were flat-out fiendish to diagnose; now they’re merely quite painful). In cases like that, having a useless bit of horizontal scrolling is probably better than zooming out.
When it’s just one thing like a long unbreakable word or an improperly-sized image, I also don’t believe zooming out is the answer: it’s normally going to be clear that it has overflowed and you should scroll horizontally, but in the mean time it ruins the entire page.
My gut feeling is that I’ve encountered significantly more pages that would benefit from
initial-scale=1 than that would do better without it, though both definitely exist.As for
overflow-x: hidden… well, they did something dumb. I also don’t think it reasonable to connect that with initial-scale=1, it’s completely unrelated.https://lobste.rs/c/5l2svk
