January 27, 2026
Big fonts, bigger fight
Try text scaling support in Chrome Canary
Chrome’s new ‘big text’ button has the internet yelling at each other
TLDR: Chrome is testing a new way for websites to honor your phone’s larger text settings so people with weaker eyesight can finally read more comfortably. But the community is split between grateful users and developers warning it will break layouts, be ignored by most sites, and create a new web headache.
Chrome is quietly testing a new way to make on‑screen text bigger, and the internet immediately turned it into a family fight at Thanksgiving. The feature uses a tiny code snippet to tell Chrome “yes, it’s safe to respect the phone’s bigger-text setting,” so people who’ve cranked up their font sizes can actually read websites. One commenter, socalgal2, basically spoke for every tired pair of eyes on the planet: this is a lifesaver.
But the dev crowd? They showed up with pitchforks. pupppet questioned why this is yet another special tag instead of a normal style setting, kicking off the classic web-standards purity war. montroser went full doomsday, calling it a “fast path to hell,” arguing you can’t just blow up text without redesigning the whole page — buttons, images, layout, everything. Another user, ivanjermakov, complained it’s “another input parameter that breaks the layout for some hidden reason,” while londons_explore predicted only 5% of sites will ever bother turning it on, leaving the feature “effectively broken” for everyone else.
So while accessibility users are ready to celebrate finally being able to read the news without squinting, developers are split between “this is progress” and “this is how the web ends.” It’s not just about bigger letters — it’s about who really controls the web: users’ needs or developers’ sanity.
Key Points
- •Chrome Canary supports a new HTML meta tag, <meta name="text-scale" content="scale" />, behind the Experimental Web Platform features flag.
- •The feature was proposed in 2024 by Josh Tumath and developed with help from Google Chrome engineers David Grogan and Philip Rogers.
- •The tag is included in the CSS Fonts 5 specification and has an explainer in the W3C CSSWG drafts repository.
- •System text scaling on iOS and Android currently does not affect web text in Safari and Chrome; Firefox for Android uses full page zoom instead.
- •The meta tag allows web text to respect OS text size preferences and is opt-in to avoid layout breakage, demonstrated with examples like the BBC and LinkedIn.