Comments on: Browser Zoom Comparison

By: francky

francky — Sat, 09 Aug 2008 05:08:53 +0000

Hi Alastair,
Nice article. In the meantime, Firefox 3 is published: indeed a magnifying zoom function is added – intelligent (no horizontal scrolling in liquid designs).

Now the Comparison Table can be updated, with FF3 as winner: all 4 cells can be green!

(as a testcase I used http://www.cosbo.nl)

By: Ikiru Design » The Movement Toward Zoom

Ikiru Design » The Movement Toward Zoom — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 20:43:49 +0000

[...] who noticed weren’t silent, but spoke while I wasn’t paying attention. (To be fair, a few noticed and spoke [...]

By: AlastairC

AlastairC — Tue, 23 Oct 2007 11:07:29 +0000

Interesting, thanks Chris. Firefox 3 will include image zooming, and I think the method of providing larger images that are scaled down will grow in popularity as browser zooms improve.

You might find things are different on different platforms though? Even in Parallels, I think the rendering of fonts and images can be different on OSX. Would you like a screen shot of IE/Op/FF on Windows?

By: Chris Hester

Chris Hester — Tue, 23 Oct 2007 10:48:20 +0000

Good work. You may be interested in a zoom test I did comparing how Opera and IE7 zoom images. Also Mac users can zoom in on anything using the mouse wheel and CTRL. Handy this morning for trying to read the ludicrously tiny text in the Quicksilver help window!

By: AlastairC

AlastairC — Tue, 24 Jul 2007 10:13:56 +0000

Hi Timur Sen,

It’s probably worth dealing with text-zoom and page-zoom as separate functions, it gets to complicated to discuss otherwise. But I agree that a minimum text size is a useful feature (in fact, IE’s text sizing is still very poor in IE7).

I’m not sure what Opera could do about the image re-sizing, I did a comparison with IE7′s and they were pretty similar. Other people have found Opera’s image zoom quality better, although I take that with a pinch of salt.

By: Timur Sen

Timur Sen — Tue, 24 Jul 2007 09:36:59 +0000

One should mention that both Opera and Firefox offer to set a minimum text size which in my oppinion is a better text zoom that the one offered in IE. While IE zooms all text including already large fonts the aforementioned function only zoom those parts whose fonts are smaller than the minimum text size TO the minimum text size. This will at least leave parts of Non-’bulletproof’ sites intact. And in combination with the magnifier option it allows you to magnify less.

I do have a problem with Operas magnify option though, it’s fast but leaves something to be desired quality wise. Most likely is uses simply bilinear algorithms to magnify and thus looks especially ugly on magnified text. I’d preder a good bicubic interpolation as an option for pc with enough power to handle it.

By: asci

asci — Thu, 12 Apr 2007 13:12:53 +0000

Except Safari, I’ve used all these browsers. For I use 1920×1200 screen resolution, the zooming is really important function to me. My score for these browsers is:
Firefox: sucks, only text size can be ajusted, pictures and frames have no change! Together with the mem leakage problem I dropped it;
IE & IE based browsers: tolerable, text, frames and texts can be magnified at the same ratio. But when zooming is performed the page scrolling is extremely slow.
Opera: excellent, maginification runs perfectly, and the scrolling speed is far better than IE.

By: Jon Atkinson Dot Org » Fixing the Wii Browser, one massive hack at a time.

Jon Atkinson Dot Org » Fixing the Wii Browser, one massive hack at a time. — Mon, 15 Jan 2007 13:53:31 +0000

[...] Most disappointingly, considering the excellent page scaling on desktop versions of Opera, the text on the screen was unreadable. It was tiny and fuzzy, and there was no preference pane to set the minimum font size. Yes, we have a CRT television and yes, it uses a SCART input, and yes, everything may look wonderful if you use the component cable and a progressive scan TV, but most people, including me, don’t have those things. [...]

By: AlastairC

AlastairC — Tue, 14 Nov 2006 19:53:50 +0000

Hi Detlef,

Had you seen my article on accessible layouts?

I’ve tested those type of layouts (that I would call “font-based” layouts) with users who have visual impairments, and they were worse than fixed layouts.

The bottom line is that unless you can implement a max-width (of 100%) in IE, they are not a good (accessible) solution.

I’ve been experimenting with IE’s expressions to get that working, but I’m slightly hampered by only having a Mac at home!

By: Detlef

Detlef — Tue, 14 Nov 2006 10:59:24 +0000

Thank you for your article. IMHO you missed one solution: to define not only the font-size but the complete layout using relative values. This would result in a zoom behavior similar to what IE7 offers now. You will also run into the problem with the horizontal scrolling, but I think this is much better then staying with the original width of a column and a larger font – the horizontal scrolling hides some information (that’s bad) but you can still access them – with the other solutions you can’t.

Best regards,

Detlef