Disable zoom on input focus in Android webpage

Here's the dilema, I have a webpage (only for android devices) and in that page I have an input box (a text box specifically) and when it gets focus the browser zooms in. I don't want it to zoom in - sounds easy, right?

Here's where it gets fun: I have to be able to zoom in general so don't say

<meta name='viewport' content='user-scalable=0'>

That won't work for me.

Also, the input box doesn't receive click events. It appears when another button is clicked a gets focus programmatically.

Here's what I've tried and they've failed so far:

jQuery('head meta[name=viewport]').remove();
jQuery('head').prepend('<meta name="viewport" content="width=720px;intial-scale=1.0;maximum-scale=1.0;user-scalable=no" />');
jQuery("#locationLock input").focus();
jQuery('head meta[name=viewport]').remove();
jQuery('head').prepend('<meta name="viewport" content="width=720px;intial-scale=1.0;maximum-scale=1.0;user-scalable=yes" />');

This also failed:

<input type='text' onfocus="return false">

And this:

jQuery("#locationLock input").focus(function(e){e.preventDefault();});

Any ideas?

The following worked for me (Android Galaxy S2):

<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, height=device-height,  initial-scale=1.0, user-scalable=no;user-scalable=0;"/>

Not possible!

I've got some bad news for you all. It's now been 6 months and no one has correctly answered the question.

Also I've finished working on that project and employer.

I'm afraid to say it, but exactly what I asked for is impossible. Sorry peoples. But I'm going to leave the question alive so people can see the other options.

Scale Issues Cause Zoom on Input Focus

There is a great difficulty in sizing the content for different screen resolutions and sizes, which ultimately is the cause of this zoom issue.

Most mobile browsers have a trigger on input focus (that you can't over-ride without difficulty):

if (zoom-level < 1)
   zoom to 1.5
   center focused input relative to screen

*yes, that was way over-simplified.

Myth of meta-tag scale fixes.

<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0, user-scalable=no"> All such viewport settings will not prevent the input-focus zoom if you are zoomed-out. These will also not over-ride any other html, body, or element sizing that would push the window to width wider than the screen.

Primary Cause

Using a window or body size larger than the device screen dimensions.

Consider the standard screen-size of most of the Galaxy line of Android smartphones: 360 x 650. If your document body, or window, is defined to be larger than that (let's say 1024 wide to make it obvious), a few things may happen:

1. The browser may auto-zoom out, to fit the width to the screen.
2. The user may do the above.
3. You may have done the above.
4. The browser will restore the zoom-level on subsequent visits to the page.
5. You're now viewing the content at ~0.35x zoom.

###Initial State 1x When loaded, the page won't fit. Some browsers may zoom-out to fit the window, but the user most certainly will. Additionally, if you zoomed-out on this page once, the browser will store the zoom-level.

###Zoom Out to Fit 0.35x Once zoomed out, the width will fit nicely, and a page with more vertical area will fill out the screen quite nicely... but...

Notice that the browser is now in a state where text and input (sized for normal 1x zoom) would be way too small to read, thus triggers a usability behavior of zooming on the input fields when they get focus.

###Zoom on Input-Focus 1.5x Typical behavior in the above case, is to zoom to 1.5x, to ensure input visibility. The result (if you've styled everything to look better when zoomed-out, or for the larger screen) is less than desirable.

Solution 1

Use a combination of css media rules, device-detection, or whatever best suits your situation. Set the window and body to a size that fills the screen-space, without exceeding it.

• This is why so many people have success with forcing input text-size to 16px;
• once you do that, its clear that you're WAY zoomed out.
• it also has the added benefit of tricking the browser into allowing slightly zoomed out windows to not trigger the focus-zoom.

Solution 2

Use the meta viewport, but then be careful with css widths.

<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, minimum-scale=1.0, maximum-scale=1.0, user-scalable=no"/>

• When using this method, you must do one of the following:
• Only use percentages for widths.
• Define an em width, and only use em and % for widths.
• see Solution 1 for using px widths.

Solution 3

jQuery.mobile $.mobile.zoom.disable();

Just make sure you start developing with it from the start, and not from the middle.

I'm not sure if this is the best way but this works for me on android and iphone.

input:focus { font-size: 16px!important}

You can use media queries to target mobile devices only.

There is a CSS solution: input{ touch-action: none; }

Yes, it's possible

input[type='text'],input[type='number'],textarea {font-size:16px;}

Tested in Android 4.2 browser and Android Chrome.

https://stackoverflow.com/a/6394497/4264

The only case I found that it kept zooming was in Chrome with Settings -> Accesibility -> Text scaling higher than 100%.

Ran into this issue today and may have a chromium update coming down the pipe soon that could resolve it. Per the chromium issue pointed to by @Jo,

> no.28 [email protected] As of https://codereview.chromium.org/196133011/, autozooming is disabled on sites that have a mobile-optimized viewport (e.g., "width=device-width" or fixed page scale viewport annotation). > > There may still be auto-scrolling when focusing editable elements on such sites, to maintain the element's visibility, but zooming will be disabled. This will go live in M41 (still a good number of weeks from hitting beta channel). > > We don't have any plans to otherwise prevent autozooming for legacy desktop sites.

As of this time, Chrome is v.40; v.41 is in BETA. Will be checking in to see if focus continues to be lost on the Android Chrome browser.

I've been looking at this problem as it's something that's been irritating me with my HTML5 Android app. I can offer half an answer. That's to say, how to stop the page scaling when a text field is focussed.

Requires Jquery Mobile:

$('#textfield').textinput({preventFocusZoom:true});

does exactly that.

But, as I said, this only solves half of the problem. The other half is allowing the user to zoom the page again afterwards. The documentation I've found seems to suggest that

    $('#textfield').textinput({preventFocusZoom:false});

or

$('#textfield').textinput('option','preventFocusZoom',false);

should un-set it, but I haven't managed to get either option to work. Not a problem if you're going to be taking the user to another page afterwards, but of limited use if, like me, you're just going to load content via AJAX.

EDIT: Although aimed at IOS,

$.mobile.zoom.disable();

Also stops the zooming. In a more suitably generic way. But unfortunately

$.mobile.zoom.enable();

Fails to restore the functionality just like the former code.

font-size: 18px;

This fixed it for my Nexus 7 (2011) running Android 4.3.

This problem only exists for me on the Nexus 7, the following devices all appear happy with font-size: 16px:

• HTC Desire Android 2.3.7
• Nexus 4 Android 4.3

Hope this helps someone!

You need 2 things:

Use a metatag like this in your head to avoid the user from zooming:

<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, height=device-height, initial-scale=1.0, minimum-scale=1.0, maximum-scale=1.0, user-scalable=no" />

And then in your css put something like the following to avoid the browser from zooming:

* { font-size:16px; }

Done! I think the browser resizes your viewport based on the smallest font or something like that. Maybe someone could explain it better, but it worked :)

If you set font size of input to 16px the zoom stops. Mobile browsers assume anything less than 16px means the users will need to zoom so why don't i do it myself.

 input[type='text'],input[type='number'],textarea {font-size:16px;}
 body{ -webkit-text-size-adjust:none;}

You may also set the below meta tag but it prevent user scaling completely.

<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width,  initial-scale=1.0, user-scalable=0;"/>

If you want user scaling but only disable input scaling try this

$("input[type=text], textarea").mouseover(zoomDisable).mousedown(zoomEnable);
function zoomDisable(){
  $('head meta[name=viewport]').remove();
  $('head').prepend('<meta name="viewport" content="user-scalable=0" />');
}
function zoomEnable(){
  $('head meta[name=viewport]').remove();
  $('head').prepend('<meta name="viewport" content="user-scalable=1" />');
}

also try this

This works where #inputbox is the id of the input form element.

I'm using this to stop a search box from auto zooming in IOS it's a mod of the earlier post above since the mouseover event would only work the first time but fails to trigger subsequent times. Enjoy this it was a real hair puller...

$("#inputbox").live('touchstart', function(e){
	$('head meta[name=viewport]').remove();
	$('head').prepend('<meta name="viewport" content="user-scalable=0" />');
	}
);

$("#inputbox").mousedown(zoomEnable);

function zoomEnable(){
  $('head meta[name=viewport]').remove();
  $('head').prepend('<meta name="viewport" content="user-scalable=1" />');
}

Just a side note:

The solution with the meta name="viewport" works perfectly. However, both native and Chrome browsers in Android have an accessibility setting named "Override website's request to control zoom". If this setting is set, nothing in HTML, CSS, or JavaScript can disable zooming.

Try this one, it works on my device:

<meta content="minimum-scale=1.0, width=device-width, maximum-scale=1.0, user-scalable=no" name="viewport" /> 

However, when I double click over the input box, the keyboard slides up and makes the page lessen in height.

Working Model

We have this working on Android. Here is the key: the font-size on the input must be the proper size. If you're page is 320px wide then you need 16px font size. If you're size is 640px then you need 32px font size.

In addition you need the following

320 wide version

<meta name="viewport" content="width=320, initial-scale=1, maximum-scale=1, minimum-scale=1" />

640 wide version

<meta name="viewport" content="width=640, initial-scale=.5, maximum-scale=.5, minimum-scale=.5" />

NOTE: THIS DOES NOT CONTAIN THE USER SCALABLE ATTRIBUTE. THAT WILL BREAK IT.

For anyone that is trying to stop zoom when trying to focus on a hidden input field, you can make the hidden input as big (or at least as wide) as the screen area(or viewable area) - this stopped it zooming.

e.g.

HIDDENinput.style.width = window.innerWidth;

HIDDENinput.style.height = window.innerHeight; (optional)

This may be good answer:

input, textarea {
  max-width:100%;
}

Don't use <meta name=viewport content='user-scalable=no'>

I'm not sure if you can disable the zoom, but you can set a restriction like this

 <meta id="viewport" name="viewport" content="width=device-width,initial-scale=0.5,maximum-scale=0.5,minimum-scale=0.5,user-scalable=no">

maximum-scale=0.5 and minimum-scale=0.5 should do the trick. It worked for me.

Update 2021

Coming back in 2021 to update my answer -> from a few accessibility conversations with my colleagues. This issues is caused by an accessibility feature for inputs with font-sizes smaller than 16px. Which means you should solve this issue by using a font size greater than or equal to 16px (1rem). This means you should solve it at your design level (designers not sucking at accessibility) rather than limiting an accessibility feature like I have above.

---

Original

Typically you don't want to disable the accessibility features.

But you can get around the zoom issue by simply adding a fixed div and placing your web page inside it.

#app {
  position: fixed;
  top: 0em;
  bottom: 0em;
  left: 0em;
  right: 0em;
  overflow: scroll;
 }

<body>
<div class="app">
  <!-- the rest of your web page  -->
  <input type="text">
</div>
</body>

<body>
     <div class="app">
     </div>
</body>

add this meta tag to your html file and it will solve the issue.

<html><head><meta name='viewport' content='width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0, user-scalable=0' ></head><body>html code</body></html> 

Perhaps you could avoid zoom, by resetting the zoom scale to 1.0? On my Android (HTC Wildfire S), I'm able to reset zoom to 1.0 like so:

$('meta[name=viewport]').attr('content',
         'initial-scale=1.0, maximum-scale=0.05');

but this moves the viewport to 0, 0 (the upper left corner of the page). So I $().scrollLeft(...) and .scrollTop(...) back to the form again.

(initial-scale=1.0, maximum-scale=0.05 is my initial value of the viewport meta.)

(The reason I do this is not to prevent Android from zooming, but rather to reset the zoom to a known scale, because of other Android bugs that otherwise corrupt screen.width and other related values.)

By accident I discovered that this:

 input {
     line-height:40px;
 }   

will prevent zoom on input on my Galaxy Nexus with Chrome for Android version 18 although that might be specific to my case:

<meta name='viewport' data='width=800'>

so for future reference, if you come here via google, this may be one of other solutions.

I had the same problem (only in Android chrome browser). I solved the issue like this.

1. Detected the userAgent, and bind the onFocus and onBlur events of the text fields to change the viewport meta content as follows

    if ((navigator.userAgent.match(/Android/i)) && (navigator.userAgent.toLowerCase().indexOf('chrome') > -1)) {
    isAndroidChrome = true;    
    }
    var viewportmeta = document.querySelector('meta[name="viewport"]');
   

2. onFocus of the text field, I set the following viewport meta content viewportmeta.content = 'width=device-width, initial-scale=1, minimum-scale=1, maximum-scale=1';

3. onBlur of the text field, I am resetting the viewport meta content to viewportmeta.content = 'width=device-width, initial-scale=1, minimum-scale=1, maximum-scale=1.4'; you can set the maximum-scale if you wish, or if you want it to be user-scalable, don't set maximum-scale

When you change the trigger the onFocus event of the input, if the maximum-scale is 1, it doesn't zoom in. This worked for me like a charm. Hope it works for you too.

As @soshmo said, user-scalable isn't an attribute that WebKit likes and so its inclusion causes WebKit to discard the whole viewport tag. I also found this to be the case with setting maximum-scale to anything other than 1, and that didn't stop the zooming.

Resetting the viewport on every focus and blur event worked for me:

var htmlWidth = parseInt($('html').outerWidth());
var screenDPI = parseInt(window.devicePixelRatio);
var screenWidth = parseInt(screen.width);
var screenHeight = parseInt(screen.height);    
var scaleVal = (((screenWidth * screenDPI) / htmlWidth)/screenDPI);
$('input[type="text"], input[type="password"], input[type="email"]').each(function() {

	//unchained for clarity

	$(this).focus(function() { 
		$('meta[name="viewport"]').attr('content', "initial-scale=' + scaleVal + ', maximum-scale=1, minimum-scale=' + (scaleVal) + ', width=device-width, height=device-height");
		// Do something to manage scrolling the view (resetting the viewport also resets the scroll)
		$('html, body').scrollTop(($(this).offset().top - (screenHeight/3)));
	});

	$(this).blur(function() { 
		$('meta[name="viewport"]').attr('content', "initial-scale=' + scaleVal + ', maximum-scale=1, minimum-scale=' + (scaleVal) + ', width=device-width, height=device-height");
	});
});

If you find that setting/resetting the viewport it's worth checking that WebKit accepts the content attributes that you're using. It took me a while to realise that using things like user-scalable caused the viewport to be discarded, so even though the JavaScript was working, the changes were not affected.

Setting the viewport user-scalable property on touchstart did it for me, no need to remove then re-add simply change it on touchstart then enable again on blur. Means the user can't zoom whilst focused on the field but a small price to pay I think.

var zoomEnable;

zoomEnable = function() {
  $("head meta[name=viewport]").prop("content", "width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0, user-scalable=yes");
};

$("input[type='text']").on("touchstart", function(e) {
  $("head meta[name=viewport]").prop("content", "width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0, user-scalable=no");
});

$("input[type='text']").blur(zoomEnable);

For Nexus 7 I was getting this issue when my media query was -

@media screen and (max-device-width: 600px) and (orientation : portrait)

So I used below media query to resolve the issue -

@media screen and (max-device-width: 600px) and (max-aspect-ratio: 13/9)

Bit late to the party, but I spent a whole afternoon yesterday going nuts before I got to this post and realized it was a feature/bug from Android. So I'll post my solution. This worked for me, and still enables user zoom:

Meta:

<meta id="meta1" name="viewport" content="width=device-width,initial-scale=1,minimal-ui"/>

CSS:

html{
	position:absolute;
	overflow:-moz-scrollbars-vertical;
	overflow-y:scroll;
	overflow-x:hidden;
	margin:0;padding:0;border:0;
	width:100%;
	height:100%;
	}
body{
	position: relative;
	width: 100%;
	height: 100%;
	min-height:100%;
	margin: 0;
	padding: 0;
	border: 0;
}

Setting HTML to position:absolute and overflow-x:hidden did the trick for me.

Worked for galaxy 4 :
Add the code to HTML header index file :

<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, height=device-height,  initial-scale=1.0, user-scalable=no;user-scalable=0;"/>

I post a answer because I faced a similar problem and I resolved it.

My condition is below.

A viewport setting in html head is

<meta name="viewport" content="width=640">

Agents are Android default browser.
They aren't Chrome, Firefox and Safari.
Android versions are under 4.2.x.

Details of our situations are not same but I think they have an essentially equal problem.

I resolved it to add "target-densitydpi=device-dpi" into meta[name=viewport] tag.

<meta name="viewport" content="width=640, target-densitydpi=device-dpi">

Try it please.

But I have to say that "target-densitydpi=device-dpi" would have a side effect.

Bad case is here.

1. An android OLD browser reads "target-densitydpi=device-dpi".
2. It goes to the other page which has no target-densitydpi property.
3. The browser starts to render the page as "target-densitydpi=device-dpi".
4. So it renders the next page in a wrong scale factor.

A solution of this case is to rewrite target-densitydpi property to "medium-dpi" from "device-dpi" using javascript before going to the next page.

An example using jQuery.

<a href="go-to-the-other" class="resetDensityDpi">Other page</a>
<script>
$(function(){
    $('.resetDensityDpi').click(function(){
        var $meta = $('meta[name="viewport"]');
        $meta.attr('content', $meta.attr('content').replace(/target-densitydpi=device-dpi/, 'target-densitydpi=medium-dpi'));
        return true;
    });
});
</script>

And... this code causes a new problem.
Some browsers render results of javascript process using cache data when they go back to previous page using a back button. So they display the previous page as "target-densitydpi=medium-dpi" NOT as "target-densitydpi=device-dpi".

A solution of this is just the opposite of above.

<script>
$(function(){
    var rollbackDensityDpi = function() {
        // disable back-forword-cache (bfcache)
        window.onunload = function(){};
        
        var $meta = $('meta[name="viewport"]');
        if ($meta.attr('content').match(/target-densitydpi=medium-dpi/)) {
            $meta.attr('content', $meta.attr('content').replace(/target-densitydpi=medium-dpi/, 'target-densitydpi=device-dpi'));
        }
    };

    if (window.addEventListener) {
        window.addEventListener("load", rollbackDensityDpi, false);
    } else if (window.attachEvent) {
        window.attachEvent("onload", rollbackDensityDpi);
    } else {
        window.onload = rollbackDensityDpi;
    }
});
</script>

Thank you.

Keep the content narrower than the window.

You will have to design your page from the beginning with this in mind, but it is entirely effective.

The key is to use the @media css at-rule to only allow components to have widths that you know the screen is big enough to contain.

For example, if you have a content width set so that the text doesn't get too spread out on a larger monitor, make sure that width only applies to large screens:

@media (min-width: 960px){
.content{
  width : 960px;
}
}

Or maybe you have an image that is 500px wide, you might have to hide it on smaller screens:

@media (max-width: 500px){
.image{
  display : none; 
}
}

You can add appearance:none into the css of the input element:

-webkit-appearance: none;
-moz-appearance: none;
appearance: none;

add this meta tag to your html file and it will solve the issue.

<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, user-scalable=no" />

adding this line solved issue for me in HTC desire 816 and SAMSUNG GALAXY S5.

Try using this, this will fit into device size and avoid zoom in/out

<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1, maximum-scale=1, user-scalable=0"/>

From what I tried the best thing that worked is to make the font inside the input 16px or more. Definitely works on the last version on chrome.

This may be a solution to that kind of probleme

<meta name="viewport" content="user-scale=no"/>
<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width"/>
<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, maximum-scale=0.9"/>

My advice would be to take a look at the best practices for android web development. To be more specific, you may need to include more in your meta tag to prevent the zooming from occurring. For Example:

<!-- set the screen width to the device width -->
<!-- set the viewport to be non-zoomable -->
<!-- fix the initial zoom to be 1:1 -->
<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0, user-scalable=no">

This works great for me.

input[type='text'],input[type='number'],textarea {font-size:16px; !important}

SOLUTION FOUND!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

At least for people that works with Phonegap/Cordova

I'm using a Galaxy Tab pc1010 with Android Froyo (2.2) I'm using Cordova 2.4.0

Add these beautiful lines to your HTML head element:

<meta name="viewport" content="user-scale=no"/>
<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width"/>
<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, maximum-scale=0.9"/>

Type them separately and use maximum scale of 0.9. I was having this problem when selecting an input field that my layout disadjusted just a little bit from the top and from the left, tried to repair it using javascript element style modification but it was awful. Thank God I found this configuration in an old mobile site project created using some tutorials with this trick.

Incase anyone was wondering you can actually get around this whole input box zooming (certainly on an iTouch as it's all I have to test on) by making the input readonly.

$("#your-input").focus(function(event){
event.preventDefault();
$(this).prop({ readOnly: true });
/*
Do your magic

*/
$(this).prop({readOnly:false});
});

---

I was really surprised to find nobody had yet tried this!