Page Zoom in IE7

re: User Zoom in IE7

Developer — Tue, 07 Feb 2006 21:47:23 GMT

Please tell me that I can get the nearest neighbor interpolation as a developer. It is ESSENTIAL to Web Developers that need to inspect images for errors, overlap, pixelation, etc.

Will there be a checkbox somewhere on the page? in the Tools > Options?

re: User Zoom in IE7

Xepol — Tue, 07 Feb 2006 21:47:40 GMT

The feature doesn't work right with images in tables. When you zoom the tables with 0 border and cell padding, the border and cell padding appear to come back.

Try http://www.ctrlaltdel-online.com/comic.php and the problem becomes obvious almost instantly, even at low zoom rates like 150%.

Hope to see it fixed soon!

re: User Zoom in IE7

Peter Gurevich [MS] — Tue, 07 Feb 2006 21:56:29 GMT

Developer, Thanks for the feedback. Yes you will be able to specify and get nearest neighbor interpolation. It will not be a check box in the Tools > Options but will be somehting that you can specify when you develop your content.

Xepol, thanks for the feedback. Please keep it coming. We will look into that issue and do our best to get it resolved by RTM.

re: User Zoom in IE7

UnexpectedBill — Tue, 07 Feb 2006 22:11:09 GMT

It's great to see new features coming out like this, and the IE public beta certainly shows signs of great progress since the nonpublic beta. (Even though I won't be able to use it, the changes and "freshening" being done are nice to see.)

However, one thing I'd really love to see in the browser (since the first nonpublic beta) is the ability to freely move the address bar/nav buttons. I hope that this feature could make it into a subsequent beta or the final release.

re: User Zoom in IE7

Gerry Tucker — Tue, 07 Feb 2006 22:20:23 GMT

The zoom feature is one of the best new things in IE7, and the one thing (about the ONLY thing) in Opera I've liked.

If I could make one suggestion, could the team make the control operate the same as in the Office "12" products? For consistency sake if nothing else.

re: User Zoom in IE7

anon — Tue, 07 Feb 2006 22:31:53 GMT

MMMYYYYY EEEEYYYYYEESSSSSSSSSS !!!!!!!!!!!

re: User Zoom in IE7

Gerry Tucker — Tue, 07 Feb 2006 22:32:56 GMT

Just to amend my comment above...

Could the team make the zoom control operate the same as in the Office "12" BETA products?

re: User Zoom in IE7

mystere — Tue, 07 Feb 2006 22:33:40 GMT

Gahh.. am I the only one that finds the nearest neighbor interpolation easier to read than the blurry mess of the bicubic interpolation? I can just feel the headache starting when I look at it.. this tells me more eye stress.

re: User Zoom in IE7

Jesse — Tue, 07 Feb 2006 22:49:56 GMT

Umm... aren't they zooming in because they already have blurry vision? How does this help? What would be ideal is increase contrast on zoom... blurry seems confusing. I see how this works for photo zooming but it's not a good idea for text people have to read.

What do people with vision issues have to say about it?

re: User Zoom in IE7

PatriotB — Tue, 07 Feb 2006 22:56:47 GMT

Developer: Looks like the new "interpolation" style can be used to specify what algorithm is used:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/workshop/author/dhtml/reference/properties/interpolation.asp
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/workshop/browser/mshtml/reference/ifaces/style5/interpolation.asp

re: User Zoom in IE7

Frederik — Tue, 07 Feb 2006 22:57:56 GMT

It would be nice if the scrollbars wouldn't zoom altogether with the webpage. That takes up so much space, with no obvious added value...

re: Page Zoom in IE7

HDR — Tue, 07 Feb 2006 23:33:56 GMT

Not sure where to post this, but I think theres a bug in the href parsing. I have links that link using <a href="/Default.php"> and IE7B2 is going to http://mydomain.com//Default.php .

re: Page Zoom in IE7

Michael — Tue, 07 Feb 2006 23:41:51 GMT

The interpolation does not appear to be working/applied with/to all image formats (and subtypes).

The following images do not appear to be filtered when zooming:
- CSS "background-image" images
- PNG images with alpha channel transparency
- GIF images with transparency

Moreover, will all this filtering be done by the CPU? Also in Vista?

After all Vista uses HW-acceleration on the (supported) video cards to render all windows to texture and display those in the final GUI. Surely resizing (with filtering) should go quicker if done by the GPU, than the CPU).

re: Page Zoom in IE7

Stuart P. Bentley — Tue, 07 Feb 2006 23:45:16 GMT

The irony?

The page zoom screws up the main page for the IE team blog. Try it, that little float-right menu covers everything up.

re: Page Zoom in IE7

Xepol — Tue, 07 Feb 2006 23:49:28 GMT

Peter Gurevich [MS] - This is a great feedback loop the IE Blog has provided, and it is clearly working. Thanks to the whole IE Team for taking part in it!

To those who find that bicubic zoom is a bad thing, I suspect it will ultimately depend on what is being zoomed. Some text embeeded in images might become "blurrier", but non-text itself is usually improved. I found the the text in the Opus online cartoon at washington post is GREATLY improved when you zoom it.
( http://www.uclick.com/client/wpc/wpopu/ )

Another problem I've noticed with Zooming is with the use of IFrames. A VERY common example is google AdSense (the Google ads panel that just about every site is running). When you zoom the page, the iframe usuaully ends up with scrollbars instead of being a perfect fit. (just about any page on the internet with iframes will show an example of this!)

re: Page Zoom in IE7

Dan Finch — Tue, 07 Feb 2006 23:50:56 GMT

I'd happy to see that there will be an option to enable nearest-neighbor interpolation. However, I'd like to recommend that you provide the option to bind the "Ctrl+Mousewheel" and "Ctrl++/-" zoom keys to what they do in IE6 (change text size). Also, I'd like to be able to change the text size in a range of more than 5 levels (as it is now). Right now, text size settings have no effect on elements which have style settings, which is frustrating.

re: Page Zoom in IE7

Jeff Schiller — Tue, 07 Feb 2006 23:56:07 GMT

Sounds great - but what about adding support for Scalable Vector Graphics in IE8 so we can do away with all this blurry interpolation of raster stuff once and for all?

new idea

Mr Stucki — Tue, 07 Feb 2006 23:59:51 GMT

Hi. I have an idea for a new technology that could greatly enhance the way we surf the web today and how search engines could also benefit from this technology for better results of what people are trying to find. Where can I contact someone from your Team? Let me know at mr.stucki@gmail.com (sorry for writing here, but don't know where else to contact you)

re: Page Zoom in IE7

Stuart P. Bentley — Wed, 08 Feb 2006 00:03:46 GMT

Er... I was talking about the RSS view thingy. That shouldn't zoom.

re: Page Zoom in IE7

Jote — Wed, 08 Feb 2006 00:11:55 GMT

The zoom menu is "lame". Use a trackbar, just like in Office 12 (in status-bar) or a popup trackbar (like in Windows Vista)

Consistency, for crying out loud! ;)

re: Page Zoom in IE7

Sukumar Rathnam — Wed, 08 Feb 2006 00:14:16 GMT

I woul second the cokment about making the zoom control look an dwork exactly the way Office 12 does. It may seem like a small usability thing butit does help with consistancy.

TechLinks - 2/7/2006

Ryan Rinaldi's Blog — Wed, 08 Feb 2006 00:19:41 GMT

Upgrading to Team Foundation Server RC via Rob Caron – Time to figure out how to upgrade our Beta 3 Refresh...

re: Page Zoom in IE7

Andrew Eberhard — Wed, 08 Feb 2006 00:41:07 GMT

I tried out the zooming feature today and immediately ran into problems with IFRAMEs. It seemed that the active IFRAME was zoomed but the rest of the IFRAMEs were not. That's going to be a usability issue.

Also, your colleges on the Office team came up with a great way to do zooming in the status bar in Office applications. I think it would be perfectly logical (and beneficial for users) if you used the same widget in IE. Consistency starts at home.

Still, great work on this feature. I'm delighted that pages with small fonts will be legible once again!

re: Page Zoom in IE7

brianduper — Wed, 08 Feb 2006 01:06:36 GMT

Is the zoom feature system wide? I feel like all of my fonts have been affected since installing IE 7?

Will the zoom feature be made available in the "web browser" control, or will this be held back like other features? On that note, what is the criteria for features that get wrapped in the .NET control? (who controls the scope for that, the IE Team or the VS.NET team?)

Thanks -

Brian Duperrouzel
http://www.slickscreen.com

re: Page Zoom in IE7

IQ70 — Wed, 08 Feb 2006 01:17:43 GMT

On the feeds page, a zoom leads to the right "search-bar, display all" column to zoom too, obstructing the whole page sometimes.

Since that "search-bar, display all" column is part of the browser and not the actual feed page be made not to zoom to such ginormous proportions?

http://img218.imageshack.us/img218/4845/ginorrmous1vr.png

re: Page Zoom in IE7

Peter Gurevich [MS] — Wed, 08 Feb 2006 01:18:17 GMT

Q: Is the zoom feature system wide? I feel like all of my fonts have been affected since installing IE 7?

A: What you might be seeing is ClearType. IE7 turns on Cleartype by default. Please see

http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2006/02/03/524367.aspx

If you used the ClearType tuner you probably switched thesystem wide ClearType on.

re: Page Zoom in IE7

Ollie — Wed, 08 Feb 2006 01:40:11 GMT

If I zoom to 400% on an RSS feed the filter box covers nearly the entire page making the page completely unreadable.

re: Page Zoom in IE7

Mike_J — Wed, 08 Feb 2006 01:51:35 GMT

The zoom is very good feature.
I use WebBrowser in the application, but for higher DPI(wide screen), I can not get the same layout as IE. In IE, switch via UseHR in registry.
I really need help.

ccnote(at)gmail.com

re: Page Zoom in IE7

Nick Presta — Wed, 08 Feb 2006 02:29:46 GMT

I'm glad this was added. Opera has this feature and I use it all the time.

re: Page Zoom in IE7

Ron — Wed, 08 Feb 2006 02:34:40 GMT

The fact that it blurs images ruins the idea of using it as a developer tool, I might want to zoom a detailed image to see the actual details as they are without being distorted and blurred.

See the following example, one image is zoomed in Firefox and the other in IE7.

http://www.rowanw.com/screens/good_bad_zoom.jpg

How hard can it be to privide the option for how images are treated when zoomed?

The way Windows Picture and Fax Viewer blurs images is the stupidist thing I've ever seen for an image viewer, don't make the same mistake with IE.

re: Page Zoom in IE7

GeorgeV — Wed, 08 Feb 2006 02:49:49 GMT

Nice feature like the print preview one, but why instead of adding new features don't you try to make IE fully compliant with today Internet standars ? This is the biggest mistake that M$ is doing, breaking the consortium standars for their own benefits.

re: Page Zoom in IE7

Xepol — Wed, 08 Feb 2006 03:05:32 GMT

Ron: in your "good" example, which is straight scaling, not all the rails are clearly visible, where as they are clearly visible in the bi-cubic zoomed version.

Ultimately, no one ever going to be happy with a single zoom method for 100% of all images. Different images need zoomed using different routines to get best effect.

That said, the bi-cubic option is ALWAYS the best option for photo realistic images, preserving larger details like arcs and bends. Strictly computer graphical images benefit differently depending on how they were designed. Ultimately, the bi-cubic zoom is often slow when done by CPU, preventing a nice sharpening filter to be applied afterwards (which makes it all that much slower). Hardware rendering of these things in Vista may make all the difference.

Which reminds me, might be time to set up vista station to play with (it sucks inside a virtual pc)

re: Page Zoom in IE7

EricLaw [MSFT] — Wed, 08 Feb 2006 03:36:10 GMT

@HDR: "I think theres a bug in the href parsing."

Please provide a repro URL. I'm not able to reproduce your problem using IE7B2P.

Thanks!

re: Page Zoom in IE7

Maurits — Wed, 08 Feb 2006 04:19:09 GMT

Maybe it's just me, but I find the uninterpolated example easier to read. Of course most zoom ratios will *require* interpolation of some kind (the exceptions are 100%, 200%, 300%, ...)

Why is this a priority at all?

Stanton McCandlish — Wed, 08 Feb 2006 05:51:25 GMT

This is a nice improvement in the "gee whiz" category, but why is any time being spent on such things that could instead be spent on finally bringing IE into compliance with the W3C HTML4/XHTML and CSS2 specs? I find that approximately 80% of my web dev time is spent on making pages do what they should with all sorts of hacks and .htc scripts and so on, for IE, when they work fine in every other browser the way I originally wrote them. If we could all bill MS for the time we developers spend making exceptions for IE, MS would be bankrupt in approximately 15 minutes.

re: Page Zoom in IE7

game kid — Wed, 08 Feb 2006 05:54:38 GMT

I just noticed the interpolation. Indeed, Opera does this, and I couldn't wait for that to come here.

Zoom is useful with some Flash too. Try it on Boschvos. http://babarageo.com/flash/boss/

re: Page Zoom in IE7

PatriotB — Wed, 08 Feb 2006 06:31:10 GMT

"Will the zoom feature be made available in the "web browser" control, or will this be held back like other features?"

Well, I'm not sure exactly on the method that IE uses to do zoom. But in apps that host the WebBrowser (or MSHTML directly), you can achieve zoom by setting the "zoom" CSS attribute on the body element. This works all the way back to IE 5.5 (zoom was a feature added to support print preview zooming). Note however that this does change the HTML content of the page (that is, if you get the outerHTML of the body element you will see the zoom style). I'm not sure if IE7 introduces a means to do zoom without modifying the content of the page...

re: Page Zoom in IE7

Ron — Wed, 08 Feb 2006 07:51:57 GMT

Xepol, take two or three steps back from your screen and look at the images again.

All of a sudden the left example will appear crispy clear, however the right one will still remain blurred and 'out of focus'. It's actually making feel a little nautious by looking at it now. : (

re: Page Zoom in IE7

Ron — Wed, 08 Feb 2006 08:00:51 GMT

We need a quick-edit button for spelling mistakes.

* nauseous

re: Page Zoom in IE7

Jamil — Wed, 08 Feb 2006 08:03:05 GMT

This feature is great!

re: Page Zoom in IE7

Poemosophi — Wed, 08 Feb 2006 08:35:43 GMT

I suggest that both types of Zoom be implemented in IE7.
Zoom (style A) for neighbor interpolation.
Zoom (style B) for bi-cubic interpolation.

» Internet Explorer Tip: Zooming With The Keyboard InsideMicrosoft - part of the Blog News Channel

Wed, 08 Feb 2006 09:17:58 GMT

PingBack from http://microsoft.blognewschannel.com/index.php/archives/2006/02/08/internet-explorer-tip-zooming-with-the-keyboard/

re: Page Zoom in IE7

Sushovan — Wed, 08 Feb 2006 09:49:50 GMT

The button does not cycle through the different preset zoom scales for me :(

Seems to be a bug!

Also please make the zoom feature of the page integrated with the 'view original size' floating button when viewing pure picture files.

re: Page Zoom in IE7

Ben Cooke — Wed, 08 Feb 2006 10:46:31 GMT

It'd be nicer if IE would natively support SVG. I know you already support VML, but that's a much more limiting spec. As monitor resolutions continue to increase, scalable graphics become ever more important.

I know this ain't going to happen for IE7, though. I'd much rather have the CSS stuff you're leaving out than SVG! :)

It's a shame to see the IE team adding still more non-standard CSS properties without at least prefixing them. Mozilla always names its properties with a -moz- prefix to avoid future conflicts with other implementations and with future revisions to the standard. Could IE use -ie-? By adding this property called "interpolation" you're preventing any future CSS spec from having that property, which is a shame for such a generic name. It should probably also be called image-interpolation, since such a specific setting doesn't deserve such a generic name.

re: Page Zoom in IE7

Robert Nyman — Wed, 08 Feb 2006 11:29:34 GMT

A great feature!

re: Page Zoom in IE7

Rob — Wed, 08 Feb 2006 15:52:35 GMT

Ben Cooke - that's a really great idea. I agree - proprietry additions should always have a code in them to distinguish them from actual standards. That's probably one of the biggest mistakes in the historical browser wars between IE and Netscape. Ultimately it caused innovation but it did make for incompatibilities.

re: Page Zoom in IE7

Phil — Wed, 08 Feb 2006 16:50:13 GMT

I haven't used ie7b2 yet (still using win2k at work), so i'll say this knowing someone will probably proove me wrong. The only example is for an image that has text in it (prbably a nav button), which i think the "nearest neighbor" looks best/easiest to read. But i'm guessin "Bi-cubic" would look a lot better for photos, textures etc.

Can anyone who has b2 shed anylight on this?

On a side note, hasn't ie had this "feature" for ages? I thought that was how Windows Explorer generated the preview thumbnail in the file view?, something about using iFrames with a ie only attribute "zoom"?

re: Page Zoom in IE7

Mark Langdon — Wed, 08 Feb 2006 16:51:32 GMT

When I click on the zoom button, the page zooms to 125% but the buttom continues to display 100%. Also clicking on the button again does nothing. It doesn't cycle through any other zoom percentages.

re: Page Zoom in IE7

Nick Fitzsimons — Wed, 08 Feb 2006 17:44:18 GMT

@Ben Cooke and Rob: it would indeed be nice if such extensions were clearly marked as such, but apparently the IE team haven't made it to section 4.1.2.1 of the CSS 2.1 spec, which states:

"Keywords and property names, beginning with -' or '_' are reserved for vendor-specific extensions." [1]

Please, good people of Microsoft, when you add this stuff in - and nobody's saying you can't - at least play by the rules.

[1] http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS21/syndata.html#q4

re: Page Zoom in IE7

Paul Michael Smith — Wed, 08 Feb 2006 17:48:38 GMT

Would it not be better to do some sort of adjust to which scaling method/alg is used depending on the size of the image?

I am of the opinion that smaller images such as an image 150px X 150px will scale better the old way where-as medium or larger sized images could scale better the new way. Maybe it is just my eyes but the smaller images are already pretty pixelated so scaling them the bi-cubic way only seems to blur an already pixelated image.

re: Page Zoom in IE7

Willem — Wed, 08 Feb 2006 18:16:21 GMT

while zooming is a good idea, it does create a horizontal scrollbar very quickly, and horizontal scrollbars are things that should be avoided at all cost.

I'd prefer it if the text size option was infinite, like in Firefox.

Or prehaps a hybrid: zooming zooms the page until it hits the right window edge, en further zoom only zooms the text?

The issue is that you can't read big gobs of text if you have to scroll horizontally, and usually, one zooms because the text is too small for comfort. The appearance of a horizontal scrollbar then defeats the purpose of zooming.

re: Page Zoom in IE7

FWeisser — Wed, 08 Feb 2006 19:24:57 GMT

The page zoom is an interesting feature and probably one I will use. If I could have everything I want, however, I would like to have two different kinds of "zooming" - increasing size of text only, as I can with Mozilla, and expanding the size of the entire page. Often, I find that I just need to bump up the font a size or two to make it readable, but I don't want to expand the site itself off the edge of the screen.

Since the direction of text on the web seesm to be towards the Myopic Miniscule aesthetic, quickly being able to make *type* readable is a must. I certainly don't want obnoxious ads to grow in size; they're intrusive enough as is. The font sizing increments on IE are too crude to do a good job of text control.

re: Page Zoom in IE7

Paul Freeman-Powell — Wed, 08 Feb 2006 21:13:56 GMT

The page zoom feature is very cool, but I've had a couple of problems with it. When you zoom in on pages which use <div> elements positioned using CSS-P, it seems to make them overlap.

Try zooming in and out on www.citycu.co.uk to see an example.

(Might just be dodgy coding, but I don't *think* it is.)

(btw. the footer displays in the wrong place in IE7.... still waiting for min-height :D)

re: Page Zoom in IE7

Oliver — Wed, 08 Feb 2006 22:44:42 GMT

It seems to be adding a grey or white outline around the edges of some images when zoomed... have a look at http://www.yewtreecottage.org or zoom in directly on the header image - http://www.yewtreecottage.org/wellingham.gif - might be the same thing that Xepol is seeing.

re: Page Zoom in IE7

Oliver — Wed, 08 Feb 2006 22:45:01 GMT

re: Page Zoom in IE7

Dean Harding — Thu, 09 Feb 2006 02:10:00 GMT

The filtering is a great feature, but could you also ensure it applies when you have the "UseHR" registry key set? See my blog post here:

http://www.codeka.com/blogs/index.php/dean/2006/02/08/more_ie7_ranting

re: Page Zoom in IE7

Ron — Thu, 09 Feb 2006 03:14:23 GMT

Phil, see my two posts above, the bi-cubic IMO is better for reading some text, but is particularly bad for small photos and detailed images as it actually distorts the images by blurring them.

The example you see above is actually altered, because if you zoom the unzoomed icon you will see that it has heavy compression artifacts, which aren't visible in their enlarged examples.

re: Page Zoom in IE7

Dean Harding — Thu, 09 Feb 2006 03:21:07 GMT

Ron: That may be true when you zoom by a lot and especially when you zoom by an integer multiple (like 2x, 3x, 4x, etc), but try zooming by a small amount (i.e. < 200%) and tell me that nearest neighbour is better. Check my blog post (above) about it, for example.

I do agree that you should be able to specify which method to use to zoom.

re: Page Zoom in IE7

Mike — Thu, 09 Feb 2006 16:34:09 GMT

Maybe rather than doing bicubic blurring, which when zooming _up_ will not add detail (rather, it is like running a gaussian blur over an image), you may want to look in to something like 2xSai, which keeps things nice 'n sharp, and scales up well... but it does take more of a performance hit.

The tradeoff could be well worth it, though.

re: Page Zoom in IE7

Richard Fink — Thu, 09 Feb 2006 18:19:15 GMT

Text Size and Zoom is an area in which, I believe, IE can really lead the way and make a unique contribution to browser usability. Making it possible, finally, for a browser to offer both web designers and users a simple, practical, and comprehensive sizing and resizing mechanism that respects both the intentions of the author and the needs of the user to be able to resize text and images on the page.
Shortly after the final release of IE7, my company, Readableweb, LLC will be releasing a product named (as of this writing) goZoom(For IE/Windows). goZoom is a script-based solution that allows web authors – by including only a single line of HTML on the page – to have IE’s existing Text Size menu initiate:
- A Page Zoom (like Opera)
- A Text Zoom (like Firefox)
- A style sheet switch
- A change in the pixel fontsize value on the BODY element which finally makes sizing in ems and percents a practical and controllable proposition
- A variety of other, more customized, sizing and resizing techniques, as well
goZoom can also be used to transparently gather statistics about which Text Size menu selection is being used

goZoom, in essence, creates a kind of "ontextsizechange" event which enables the page’s author to detect and respond to the current setting in IE’s Text Size menu both when the page firsts loads and then afterwards when and if the user makes a new selection. It works transparently. The method is Patent Pending.
With goZoom, many of the benefits of a Zoom feature can be granted to IE 5.5 and IE 6 users now, today. (Maybe zoomNow is a better name!)
Initially, we were holding back waiting for IE7 with the assumption that the Text Size menu would remain pretty much as is. However, with the surprise introduction of a Page Zoom feature alongside the Text Size feature, it became clear to me that I should come forward with a few ideas.
I am a MCSE and an MS Certified Partner.
While I have issues with how the Zoom feature works and its implementation within the interface, I would like to first focus on fixing IE’s Text Size menu which, as you are probably aware, has been bedeviling web designers for many years now. Would you consider making any changes to it?
Here is one solid idea:
All of the problems with sizing text in ems and percents (to make it resizeable in IE) stems from the fact that the default font size in IE is quite large and once you try to adjust it by setting the font size for BODY to a pixel value, IE will no longer resize the text set in ems and percents because it inherits this base size from the font size of the body element.
goZoom gets around this problem by mapping a pixel font-size value to correspond with each selection in the Text Size menu and then applying each to the body element depending upon the menu selection.
A typical mapping (chosen by the author of the page) for smallest, smaller, medium, larger, or largest might look like this:

[10,11,12,13,14]

In this example, the single pixel shift makes for much smoother gradations and the problem of text size that’s unreadably small at selections of ‘smaller’ and ‘smallest’ becomes much less of an issue and could even be handled with a mapping like this:
[11,11,12,13,14]

This is a TESTED solution. It works great. Ems and percents become a simple and easy proposition.
Here is what I propose for IE7:
Remember the old basefont tag? (Still supported, I think.) Well, what if there was a meta tag you could use to specify a base pixel font size corresponding to each of the five settings in the Text Size menu - medium, larger, largest, smaller, smallest?
Like this:
<meta text-size="10,11,12,13,14" />
(A meta tag was created to toggle the image toolbar on and off, so why not this?)
Such an approach harms nothing and helps a lot going forward. IE versions prior to 7 will ignore the tag. If there is no tag, the Text Size menu works like it usually does. (Which is to say, it does nothing.)
But at least, with this approach, nearly all of the problems designers have with the Text Size menu go away. Plus, the author of the page would have some input so as to preserve the integrity of the layout but still give users the ability to boost the text in small - or large, if the designer thinks it's warranted - increments.
Personally, when I visit a web site, I want to see what the author of the page originally intended for me to see. But I would also like the author to provide me with an intelligent resizing scheme that allows me to adjust for my eyesight and monitor size and screen resolution without blowing apart the overall visual message. Just a little boost up or down is usually enough for more comfortable reading.
Taking it one step further, this concept could also be extended to include alternate stylesheets corresponding to each selection in the Text Size menu, as well.
This, too, has been tested in the development of goZoom and it, too, works excellently.
I will be reposting with a link to a whitepaper with more suggestions, if you are interested, in a few days.
Overall, IE7 looks like a big improvement. Hoping this input helps.

re: Page Zoom in IE7

al — Fri, 10 Feb 2006 05:03:36 GMT

Frederic: "It would be nice if the scrollbars wouldn't zoom altogether with the webpage. That takes up so much space, with no obvious added value..."

Yeah, it would be nice, wouldn't it? MS, however, decided AGAIN that standards don't mean anything at all, and made the scrollbars the property of the canvas, not the GUI.

Why anybody would want to align anything to the scrollbar rather than simply align to the right of the container/canvas beats me. It seems like another bass-ackwards complication from M$.

Geeze, guys, can't you just make a frickin browser without adding all this extra crap and "special" tweaks.

re: Page Zoom in IE7

al — Fri, 10 Feb 2006 05:07:30 GMT

I like the zoom because it makes a true print-prieview reduction.

Maybe you could have a left click on the zoom icon will zoom in by 10% and a right-click will zoom out by 10%.

Make the button look like this:

[ZOOM|v]

The icon that you right or left click is the big part, and it has a drop-down part on the right. This is a standard way to make toolbar buttons with both a clickable area and a submenu.

Page Zoom and RSS

Axel — Fri, 10 Feb 2006 09:36:42 GMT

Don't know weather this issue was mentioned before: If I use zooming to 125% on RSS-Feeds, the RSS-"menubar" overlaps the text on the right handside of the text. It would be nice to be able minimize this menubar...

re: Page Zoom in IE7

Mike Alexander — Fri, 10 Feb 2006 10:11:15 GMT

I would also strongly urge you to use a slider control for zoom like Office 12 does. It's really nice, but if you do it don't forget to leave a little dead spot at 100% (like O12 does) to make it really easy to get back to normal size again.

re: Page Zoom in IE7

Chris H — Fri, 10 Feb 2006 15:58:36 GMT

Just out of curiosity, will IE 7 have any script property that identifies the current page zoom status?

It's been a long while since I've used JavaScript, so don’t know of the standards, but will anything like 'window.zoomstatus' be available and usable in a script?

I only ask, because with the ability to pre-load images, and if a zoom status property does exist, then web sites could use it to detect when a page is zoomed, and perhaps reload an important image to scale where appropriate? For example:

window.onzoom = function() {
if (window.zoomstatus == 125%)
… code to replace picture.jpg with picture125.jpg
else if (window.zoomstatus > 125% < 150%)
… code to replace picture.jpg with picture125-150.jpg

};

I personally think this would be handy, especially for when smaller images are enlarged via the zoom.

re: Page Zoom in IE7

JRT — Fri, 10 Feb 2006 17:29:06 GMT

You MUST have a Text Zoom or at least make sure you can override the stylesheet in an easy way by making the text size larger. That's a MUST.

re: Page Zoom in IE7

Banned in Boston — Fri, 10 Feb 2006 21:01:01 GMT

Image zoom is a _nice-to-have_.

TEXT zoom is a MUST-HAVE!

re: Page Zoom in IE7

Gene Lue — Fri, 10 Feb 2006 23:54:05 GMT

IE7 User Zoom appears to behave differently with "default" scrollbars and "custom" scrollbars.

In documents with "custom" scrollbars (i.e. scrollbars defined in CSS stylesheet), IE7 zooms the scrollbars along with the document contents. In documents with "default"scrollbars (i.e. scrollbars not defined in CSS stylesheet), the scrollbar size is not affected by User Zoom --- which is the preferable action IMHO.

I first came across this inconsistency when testing an old family website in IE7; the website uses multi-framed windows with some frames employing custom colored scrollbars. With intermixed scaled and unscaled scrollbars, the website window would appear like a hodgepodge when selecting high zoom factors. I have subsequently done additional testing with both multi-framed and single-frame windows, and it appears that the triggering factor for IE7 User Zoom to scale the scrollbar is whether the scrollbar is defined in the CSS stylesheet.

Is this a program bug?

re: Page Zoom in IE7

Olivier — Sat, 11 Feb 2006 01:09:55 GMT

Would be great to have a "FitToScreen" option. To make the page fill the entire width of the brother.

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re: Page Zoom in IE7

Simon — Sun, 12 Feb 2006 02:28:46 GMT

It would be great to have some way as a developer to specify higher resolution images for the higher zoom levels.

I'm currently finishing a huge web project where we created zoom buttons that trigger 3 different layouts that all use differently sized css background images. As a result, everything stays incredibly sharp and readable when you zoom in.

It would be fantastic if you gave web developers some control here and enable them to tie in to the zoom control via scripting somehow.

Please let me for exmple define 1 default and 2 alternate style sheets and tell the browser that the default one is for display at 100% size, the second is for 135% size and the third shows the page at 170%.

When the user selects the zoom level, the browser should use the nearest available style sheet and scale up or down from the size the developer specified to match the value the user has selected.

That would be quite interesting i guess...

Thank you so much for improving Internet Explorer!

re: Page Zoom in IE7

Arjan — Sun, 12 Feb 2006 17:48:25 GMT

Page zooming doesn't work for open word documents in the broweser(http://www.bk.tudelft.nl/students/b1003666/internet/images/Rapport 7_dec.doc)

re: Page Zoom in IE7

Relja Markoivc — Mon, 13 Feb 2006 08:12:35 GMT

Please consider rescaling ClientWidth / Height when the zoom level changes to handle high DPI displays. Since you may want to do both the current and the new proposed behavior for different scenarios, you may want to add a switch for this.

Thanks!

re: Page Zoom in IE7

Licantrop0 — Mon, 13 Feb 2006 20:13:45 GMT

I quote "Zoom to Fit" option.
I do not want to see ANY horizontal scrollbar if they are not necessary, and I want the zoomed web page automatically centered.

Also, there is a great bug in this function, here is the step to repro:
1) Zoom a WebPage to 200%.
2) Close it.
3) open control panel -> user account -> user account.
4) notice that also this part is zoomed to 200!

so, please, every webpage must have IT'S own zoom level!

I have 1280x1024 Resolution on my screen.
Some site are optimized for 800x600, other for 1024x768: I want a standard zoom level that handle that, not only 125%, 150%, etc...

re: Page Zoom in IE7

Alex — Mon, 13 Feb 2006 21:20:15 GMT

On some pages that have javascript mouseover help tips with relative coordinates to the pointer instead of the page item, the coordinates are interpreted incorrectly, so that the help tip isn't placed beside the pointer. A9.com has "site information" links that place the tip relative to the link, in which case the item is correctly positioned in zoom mode. But I have experimented with other sites that place the tip relative to the pointer, in which case, the coordinates are way off.

re: Page Zoom in IE7

Ben — Wed, 15 Feb 2006 06:03:53 GMT

This is a hilarious feature to me since I hacked support for this into IE6. The functionality is all there in IE6 because of the CSS zoom property. I added some buttons to the toolbar that called some javascript that would basically fiddle with the zoom property.

The reason why I did this was actually to fix the notorious chopped-off-on-the-right printing bug. I just figure the width of the webpage and zoom out until it will fit the width of a printed page. I have a button on the toolbar for this too.

This only took a few dozen lines of javascript to accomplish. I hope you guys didn't spend too long writing these features, because it was practically already there in IE6!

re: Page Zoom in IE7

Michael — Wed, 15 Feb 2006 11:08:54 GMT

I really love the zoom feature - it allowes "layed back" browsing.

However, variable (full-) width webpages like *.microsoft.com should (optionally) reflow during zoom as they do when a larger font is selected.

I recently answered a survey on microsoft.com, zoomed it and then had to scroll left and right all the time to read the longer answers.

re: Page Zoom in IE7

Pete — Sun, 19 Feb 2006 11:35:26 GMT

Can you make page zoom not resize images like firefox does?

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WebBrowser Zoom

Code Samples — Mon, 27 Aug 2007 22:39:09 GMT

Zonder meer een leuke feature in IE7 is de zgn. Page Zoom . Om dit zelf in je applicatie te gebruiken

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