Zoom problems in IE7
Having some way to increase font sizes is pretty important for comfortable browsing. Currently Firefox and Safari allow you to force an increase of the font size on the page, leaving images unchanged. ‘Zooming’ takes this one step further and enlarges the whole page, with graphics and text staying in proportion. Opera already has this and IE7, due for release this autumn, also has this feature.
I’ve been testing my websites in IE7 beta for a while now, just as I should, and generally I’ve found very few problems. If a page displays properly in IE6 and in Firefox, then it’s usually fine in IE7, or at least pretty easy to sort out. However, the zoom function in IE7 beta 3 is particularly buggy. This is disappointing, given how well the zoom works in Opera 9 (presumably a company with a much smaller development budget) and worrying for those of us who like to make our sites look good under all common browsing conditions
As an experiment, I looked at a number of sites with CSS-driven layouts. In roughly half of these there was some layout breakup under zoom, while in Opera 9 the zoom rendered an enlarged page in perfect proportion in every case. Here are a few screenshots of layouts breaking up under zoom:
In a number of cases, such as in the screenshots for Team Lesotho and Harvey Brothers, the fault seems to be a failure to resize background images applied to the body element. These images remain at their original size, whilst all other images, including background images applied to other elements, are enlarged, resulting in various kinds of layout breakup.
Looking on the Microsoft IE7 feedback site (requires login), a number of zooming problems have been reported and Microsoft seems to have fixed some of them in beta3. Obviously quite a few still remain to be sorted out, however, as we can see from the screenshots above. Disappointingly, Microsoft says that some of these zooming bugs will not be fixed prior to the browser’s official release this autumn. Whether we can learn to code around these remaining bugs remains to be seen.