Browser double-tap zoom zooms too much when tapping a small element on page [not relevant]

asked 2014-06-29 17:29:15 +0200

tokaru
14054 ●175 ●219 ●220

Example: open together.jolla.com in the browser and double-tap on one of the boxes displaying the number of votes. The browser zooms in so far that the box width fits into the display width, which is a zoom level that is not useful at all. This is even more annoying when double-tapping into a table, where you always zoom in on a single td elements, which is usually not desired.

What makes things worse: the high-level zoom seems to be pretty resource-intensive, (at least on my phone) the zoomed view stays blurry for a few seconds, sometimes the browser app is even reported as unresponsive by the operating system, offering the option to kill it or wait.

Hence, I suggest to introduce a maximum zoom (and minimum) level for double-tap zoom only. It could be implemented something in the lines of:

• If the reference element (i.e. the double-tapped DOM element) takes up less than e.g. 25% of the display width, try its parent element as new reference element for zooming in => avoid zooming in too far.
• If the reference element takes up more than e.g. 85% of the display width, apply 50% zoom always.
• Otherwise just zoom in on the reference element (as currently implemented)

Note, I am talking about "width" here, which assumes portrait mode, of course this should be handled likewise in landscape mode.

An implementation like this should keep the important possibility to zoom in on content containers (e.g. text paragraphs), while avoiding zoom levels that are of little use.