I keep my browser zoomed in substantially to compensate for uncorrectable vision issues. I’d say perhaps once per day I’ll encounter a website that has never had zoom in/out (ctl +/-) tested because if you zoom up even one level from 100%, everything breaks.

There are several equally useless failure modes I’ve seen with this, a few off the top of my head:

  - rendering fails, everything falls apart

  - some elements disappear

  - it drops into the feature-limited mobile view

  - the author or framework overrides zoom with some other behavior — this one makes me especially crazy because they had to do *extra work* to screw up accessibility

Certain websites are impossible for me to use and I just avoid them.

▲ Joker_vD 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I remember seeing a website that had <html style="font-size: XXX%"> for the top-level element, and had JS that would dynamically recalculate that percentage on every resize event to keep the visual font size almost (exactly) constant. Made me think for a moment that my mouse wheel broke.

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jandrese an hour ago | parent | next [-]

One of my pet peeves in the modern web is when someone displays an image and scales it to exactly the size of your screen, but I want to look more closely at a part of the image so I do a scrollwheel zoom, only for the image to actually shrink as every UI element except the thing I want gets bigger. And then you go "ok, right click on the image and do the "Open Image in new tab" thing and somehow the site defeats that and puts all of their UI crap in the new tab as well.

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masfuerte 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

The modern version is to use @media to achieve the same annoying effect without js. Fortunately, there's a finite number of rules so I've found that if you zoom far enough the text does actually start getting larger. Though I expect that someone's already figured out how to use CSS Math to keep text tiny at all zoom levels.

	▲	bryanrasmussen 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		>The modern version is to use @media to achieve the same annoying effect without js. I think that is the up until about 2020 way, the modern way is using clamp to do it https://css-tricks.com/linearly-scale-font-size-with-css-cla...

▲ pbalau 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> I’d say perhaps once per day I’ll encounter a website that has never had zoom in/out (ctl +/-) tested because if you zoom up even one level from 100%, everything breaks

Just tested, hn breaks if you zoom >110%.

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oneeyedpigeon 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

How does it break for you? Seems OK to me on android — in fact, I already had it at 110%. Reminded me to check my desktop settings which have HN fixed at 125%. I cannot believe that, in 2026, the default font size is set at 12px — is anyone actually reading it at that size?!

	▲	voidUpdate 3 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		I leave HN on default everything, but I have a 1080p monitor so it might look bigger for me than someone with a higher resolution monitor... I don't know how that works. But I often have to zoom out of websites linked here because the text is so big and it feels uncomfortable to read
	▲	ryandrake 3 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		> I cannot believe that, in 2026, the default font size is set at 12px — is anyone actually reading it at that size?! The very first "quality of life" thing I do when I install a new computer / operating system nowadays is double (sometimes triple) the default font size. 12pt was probably fine when our monitors were 640x480, and when we were 18 years old.
	▲	pbalau 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		For some reason I though the GP was talking about browsing on mobile, where I have the issue: https://imgbox.com/EiovsE5b https://imgbox.com/A4Fl9lE9

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jabroni_salad 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I browse everything at 125% and HN is fine on my machine so I decided to check. It depends on your width.

1080px wide (aka on my vertical monitor) HN comments stop reflowing > 300%

At 1920px wide it never stops reflowing.

	▲	pbalau 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		For some reason I though the GP was talking about browsing on mobile, where I have the issue: https://imgbox.com/EiovsE5b https://imgbox.com/A4Fl9lE9

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cestith 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Which platform is this on? I usually read hn on a desktop browser, and it works fine well above 110% there.

	▲	pbalau 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Android https://imgbox.com/EiovsE5b https://imgbox.com/A4Fl9lE9

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4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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