When trying out the beta of Internet Explorer 9 I noticed that there still seems to be no way of increasing or decreasing the size of text set in pixels without zooming the entire page.

With full page zoom being the default, many people don’t realise that you can in fact change text size only, without zooming the entire page. Sure, increasing text size in IE is not as useful as in browsers like Firefox and Safari since it only allows a pretty limited size increase. But still, the option is there and does nothing on sites that use “px” as the unit for font-size in their CSS.

If you’re thinking “Wait, hasn’t he been on about this issue before?”, you’re absolutely right. From the archives: IE 7 does not resize text sized in pixels and IE 8 still does not resize text sized in pixels.

I guess I just can’t see why Microsoft doesn’t change this, at least in standards mode. It would be great if IE behaved the same way as other browsers.

Posted on October 18, 2010 in Accessibility, Browsers, Usability

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