Thursday, May 25, 2006

IE7 Page Zooming is rubbish

IE7 Beta 2 has introduced a new feature called Page Zooming.

This zooms everything on the page canvas equally, images included. Unfortunately their implementation leaves alot to be desired, and I contest that, as is, it is unusable.

The main problem is that zoom events do not change the pages client width and height, therefore the page gets no chance to resize itself to the new viewport and spills out of the frame (introducing that pariah of GUI design, the horizontal scroll bar) or shrinks into the frame leaving an ugly gap. Oh, and the images look awful as well!

What I would have prefered is to adopt the same functionality as Firefox. Only fonts resize (as in IE6), and their size cannot be fixed by the page designer. Also, fonts can grow indefinately - essential for high resolution monitors. Yes, this does not apply to text in graphics, but that is an accesibilty faux-pas anyway. CSS in all the browsers is more than rich enough to make any text effect you could desire from real text.

I tend to dislike any website design that doesn't support liquid flow. Yes, it is harder, yes it means more work, but it is the best way to support multiple platforms.

Incidentally, in IE6 and Firefox, holding the CTRL key and moving the scroll wheel back and forth will resize the text (great feature). IE7 have replaced this with their horrid Page Zoom. Luckily they have moved the text-size shortcut to CTRL + SHIFT instead - without that they might have lost me forever to Firefox :-)

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Didn't know about that Ctrl-Scroll feature - quite useful.

NotesTracker - Tony Austin said...

I've been trying for months to get somebody at Microsoft to recognize their blunder (with regard to IE7 not supporting a key binding for text resizing). It seems to little avail.

I've put various postings on IE7 blogs, and also tried to get a positive reaction at official IE Feedback site ... I seem to have failed miserably!

Search from my attempt under "Text resizing via Ctrl+Mousewheel given in Beta2 then taken back in IE7 Beta3" (Feedback ID 152121) the URL of which is Text resizing via Ctrl+Mousewheel given in Beta2 then taken back in IE7 Beta3

Please somebody else please have a go at them too, but do it on this official IE Feedback site.