

Ask HN: Do people use the zoom functionality in browsers? - websitescenes

Using some CSS3 shapes that distort if the user zooms in. Looks fine zoomed out and 100%. Is this a concern?
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georgemcbay
Of course people zoom in with their browsers, especially older people or those
otherwise sight-impaired, but the set of zoomers isn't limited to just them...
in a universe of an increasing number of very high DPI screens (but where you
still can't expect those to be the standard), zooming is pretty commonplace.

I zoom myself when a designer decides to use some stupidly small font and then
often don't even notice the zoom is on until some other website is using a
larger than normal font.

So, yes, people do zoom. Does it matter that this breaks your CSS3? I don't
know, I'd have to see the breakage to know if it is a showstopper or merely a
visual annoyance.

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websitescenes
Definitely just visual but I am not happy about it. I for sure want to fix it,
just not sure if it's really a priority.

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evan_
I have great eyesight and I still zoom on a lot of websites- I often read
webpages while I eat lunch, so I put the laptop a little further away than you
normally might. Zooming even 10-20% makes it just that much more comfortable
to read.

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thesmileyone
I actually only zoom on HN, if I want to sit back with my feet up at my
desktop I can do so.

Don't be lazy and just think people won't. I was on a website the other day
where the shopping cart, category and price filters all disappeared completely
if you zoomed in, which was a shame because they had size 6 text and great
products; it was enough to put me off buying anything from that website.

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ElongatedTowel
Absolutely. I actually use a Firefox Addon to rebind some of the keys so I can
zoom by pressing +, - and reset it with *.

Text is usually not the problem, but images and thumbnails are. I rather zoom
in to see the thumbnail up close instead of browsing to every site that is
linked via one.

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marssaxman
Oh heck yeah. For some reason fonts are often set too large and they spill out
of their boxes leaving no left margin, and zooming out one step fixes this. I
wonder if it has something to do with this machine's retina display?

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gknoy
I zoom on any website that has ridiculously small font sizes. A few of the
blogs linked here have such small text for their content that I will crank
Chrome's zoom up to 150%. (For most browsing, I use 100%.)

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rachelbythebay
Yep, I keep HN itself one click higher in fact. I don't think I zoom any other
sites... just this one.

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mooze
I zoom out on tiny text, yes, but I also do so on websites with interesting
semi-covered backgrounds.

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factorialboy
I do, all the time. And I'm not even old. Some pages are just unreadable.

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hollerith
I zoom all the time. Saves me from having to put on my glasses.

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websitescenes
Wow, I never realized this was such a heavily utilized feature. Do the devs
out there test for zoom compatibility? I kinda have on and off but hadn't
given it much thought.

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grumps
I think browsers all do it differently. I know we don't... some things just
flat out break on zoom.

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bowerbird
not only do i zoom, but i have set the minimum font-size in safari to
18-point, causing many "pixel-perfect" sites to fail, often just a bit,
sometimes spectacularly.

-bowerbird

