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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-14T19:02:23+00:00

I’m designing an HTML page for display in Android browsers. Consider this simple example

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I’m designing an HTML page for display in Android browsers. Consider this simple example page:

<html>
<head><title>Simple!</title>
</head>
<body>
<p><img src="http://sstatic.net/so/img/logo.png"></p>
</body>
</html>

It looks just fine on the standard HVGA phones (320×480), but on HDPI WVGA sizes (480×800 or 480×854) the built-in browser automatically scales the image up; it looks ugly.

I’ve read that I should be able to use this tag to force the browser to stop scaling my page:

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

… but all that does is disable user scaling (the zoom buttons disappear); it doesn’t actually prevent the browser from scaling my image. Adjusting the scale factors (setting them all to 2.0 or 0.5) has no effect at all.

How can I force the WVGA browser to stop scaling my images?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Ah, found it by searching through the Android source code. There’s a new Android-specific “target-densityDpi” setting available in the “viewport” meta tag; as far as I can tell, it’s totally undocumented, except for the check-in comment!

    Add dpi support for WebView.

    In the “viewport” meta tag, you can specify “target-densityDpi”.
    If it is not specified, it uses the default, 160dpi as of today.
    Then the 1.0 scale factor specified in the viewport tag means 100%
    on G1 and 150% on Sholes. If you set “target-densityDpi” to
    “device-dpi”, then the 1.0 scale factor means 100% on both G1 and Sholes.

    Implemented Safari’s window.devicePixelRatio and css media query
    device-pixel-ratio.

    So if you use “device-dpi” and modify the css for font-size and image
    src depending on window.devicePixelRatio, you can get a better page on
    Sholes/Passion.

    Here is a list of options for “target-densityDpi”.

    device-dpi: Use the device’s native dpi as target dpi.
    low-dpi: 120dpi
    medium-dpi: 160dpi, which is also the default as of today
    high-dpi: 240dpi
    : We take any number between 70 and 400 as a valid target dpi.

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