As display technologies advance and the world begins to fully embrace accessibility on the web, the Zoom and High DPI experience of all browsers has become increasingly important. This is the first in a series of posts describing changes and improvements to Internet Explorer 8 to enable a more readable web on today’s displays. In this post, we’ll focus on enhancements to the Zoom user experience.
How to Use Zoom
First, let’s review how to take advantage of Zoom in Internet Explorer 8. Internet Explorer 7’s zoom was closer to optical zoom, where every element on the page was scaled relative to its size as rendered at 100% or ‘normal’ view. This led to a number of issues for users, such as the overabundance of horizontal scrollbars. The new zoom in Internet Explorer 8 scales elements that are defined in absolute units, such as pixels, while not affecting the size of elements defined in relative units, such as percentages. For a full description of the zoom layout and rendering behavior in Internet Explorer 8, please see Saloni’s blog post from Beta 1. Preferences for individual users differ greatly, so there are four ways to zoom in and out on web pages:
- Via the user interface
- Via keyboard shortcuts
- Via the mouse wheel
- Via touch gestures (available on Windows 7)
Full Article – http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2009/05/18/making-the-web-bigger-part-1-improvements-to-zoom.aspx
