Is it necessary to include initial-scale=1.0 in the meta viewport tag?

HTML & CSS
1

Hello,
While browsing an HTML theme today, I noticed the following viewport meta tag:

<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width">

It doesn’t include initial-scale=1.0. After checking the MDN documentation, I found out that 1 is the default value. Does this mean that omitting initial-scale=1.0 has the same effect as including it? Can I safely use the tag without specifying initial-scale=1.0?"

2

I doubt it :slight_smile:

I wrote a suite of tests some years ago and all failed in some way unless initial scale was present. My findings were backed up in a post from a well known site at the time and other sites.

Obviously that was a while ago and things should be more consistent these days but I still see differences without the initial scale especially on rotating. Of course this will vary on device and os etc.

There is also the added issue of text zooming on rotation which is why you usually need the webkit text-size adjust in your body css also to avoid compound errors.

  -webkit-text-size-adjust: 100%;
  text-size-adjust: 100%;

Unless you want to go out and re test all the current browsers and systems I would say keep the initial-scale in place :slight_smile: Mozilla recommend it still.

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3

It’s weird then that MDN defines a default value for the initial-scale, which would imply that you could ignore it and use the default.

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4

Just because the “standards” define the default doesn’t mean the browsers actually implement them. They’re getting better but some are still behind the curve…

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