Larger text on iOS Safari

[Tim Green]

I use XAMPP for local testing of web development. The last couple of days I thought that I had a serious issue with my responsive code on iOS devices because they were all displaying all text comically large. Normally, -webkit-text-size-adjust and text-size-adjust to none or 100% should fix this, but no response. After wasting a lot of time trying to fix it locally I realized that my pages were displaying normally on iOS when I put them on my normal, internet-facing website with my provider, who is also running Apache.

I did some more testing and the strange enlarged-text problem is really only showing up on iOS when the pages are served locally by XAMPP and Safari. Chrome on iOS is not affected, nor is Android. I activated Apache an old Mac running El Capitan as another local server and iOS Safari displays the text normally when the files are being served from there.

This behavior is bizarre and I'm a little stumped. It's making local testing on my Windows development setup difficult. Does anyone have any idea what setting in the XAMPP Apache setup could be responsible for this? I'm running XAMPP 7.3.7.

[Altrea]

None.
Text size is purely a browser / html thing.

[Tim Green]

None.
Text size is purely a browser / html thing.

I know. That is why it is so bizarre. It is definitely being displayed differently on XAMPP than on other servers and that is the only difference, using EXACTLY the same source files. Visit on the Mac Apache or my Internet-facing server with my provider: Normal, Visit on the XAMPP server: Comically enlarged. Only on iOS Safari. All the text is sized relatively with ems/rems, which is the only slightly out-of-the-ordinary factor I can think of. Even there though there should be nothing at all on the server affecting it.

[Altrea]

Maybe the IOS browser does act differently if a webside is in intranet instead of internet.
The Microsoft internet explorer for example switches in quirks mode for intranet sides.

[Tim Green]

Maybe the IOS browser does act differently if a webside is in intranet instead of internet.
The Microsoft internet explorer for example switches in quirks mode for intranet sides.

I thought of that possibility too. That's why I set up another intranet server on the old Mac, and since everything was normal there it doesn't seem to be that. I think I'm just going to have to write it off as a strange iOS Safari gremlin.

[Nobbie]

There is an option to influence different behaviour between servers, perhaps one server uses different MIME Type for plain text than other servers do. Perhaps already the "Content-Type" header has different values from one server to another (we have no clue, what your servers offer as Content-Type), that may cause different appearence.

Also your pages might use Google fonts, which are evaluated online, and perhaps the browser cannot evaluate in one scenario (due to firewall reasons or so), and the other can. Perhaps only safari cannot pass the firewall - actually there are still lots of options, WHY the sites are looking differently. Due to different MIME Types its NOT only a browser thing and last not least it can be an JavaScript issue. We dont know anything about your code.

[Tim Green]

Hi Nobbie,

Thanks a lot for those tips!