alt Hacker NewsSeriously.
Browsers originally had text zoom -- only text zoom -- until page zoom was invented, I can't remember by which browser. And then page zoom quickly became the "main" zoom mechanism across all browsers because it was obviously so much better -- icons, layout, everything adjusted together. (And for those who remember, when there was only text zoom, it was a common practice/workaround to define everything in em rather than px, precisely to "fake" page zoom with text zoom.)
I'm baffled by the idea of trying to bring text zoom back. Just no, a million times. We tried it. It was bad.
Replies
gary_0 • today at 5:10 AM
My memory that far back is hazy but I seem to recall being able to do full-page zoom in Opera circa 2003.
Page zoom is fine for relatively minor adjustments, but if you're browsing with a high page zoom setting you'll still run into a ton of problems.
Stuff like "page overlays become so large that they overflow the bounds of the screen, but are fixed position so you can't even scroll them to make the X button visible."
Or in the slightly better case, "most of the screen is obscured by the enlarged floating header, the layout of which is totally broken by the relatively narrow viewport relative to content size, and with your large page zoom setting the remaining half of the screen can fit about five words on it at a time."
Either way websites need to do accessibility testing and clearly most of them don't.
Safari has a setting for "Never use font sizes smaller than __" which used in combination with a not as high page zoom setting is a little less likely to make pages completely fucked, because it's only acting on text that was small to begin with.