Hi there, I am pretty sure this is a result of history. Desktop browsers never had support for the viewport meta tag, which was added initially on iOS for the sake of giving mobile developers more control on how contents should be laid out, possible due to vastly different viewport size, web apps etc. The use case for something like this hasn't really been big on the desktop, though it could still be useful. As a matter of fact the Qt port supports this out of the box and we even have a setting to set the default layout viewport when no viewport meta tag is present:
Here is our documentation: \qmlproperty int WebViewExperimental::preferredMinimumContentsWidth \brief Minimum contents width when not overriden by the page itself. Unless the page defines how contents should be laid out, using e.g. the viewport meta tag, it is laid out given the width of the viewport (in CSS units). This setting can be used to enforce a minimum width when the page does not define a width itself. This is useful for laying out pages designed for big screens, commonly knows as desktop pages, on small devices. The default value is 0, but the value of 980 is recommented for small screens as it provides a good trade off between legitable pages and non-broken content. With the default value of 0, desktop pages will lay out as always (given the current viewport). Cheers, Kenneth On Mon, May 7, 2012 at 4:07 PM, Robert Kroeger <rjkro...@chromium.org> wrote: > Hi all, > > Some of the Chromium developers had a discussion recently about whether or > not it was desirable for Chromium to always support the viewport tag even on > the desktop. This prompted us to observe that desktop Safari does not > support the viewport tag while mobile Safari does. Is anybody willing to > comment on why this choice was made? > > Rob. > > > _______________________________________________ > webkit-dev mailing list > webkit-dev@lists.webkit.org > http://lists.webkit.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/webkit-dev > -- Kenneth Rohde Christiansen Senior Engineer Nokia Mobile Phones, Browser / WebKit team Phone +45 4093 0598 / E-mail kenneth at webkit.org http://codeposts.blogspot.com ﹆﹆﹆ _______________________________________________ webkit-dev mailing list webkit-dev@lists.webkit.org http://lists.webkit.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/webkit-dev