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Comment by ToastyMallows | Hacker News Reader

> "many users browse at non-100% zoom"

This sounds dubious. Do you have a source for this?

Personally I rarely browse at 100% zoom. I magnify each page until I only have ~20px of margin and no whitespace.

Given there are tens of millions of people on the Internet, even if a small amount like 0,01% did it, it would already be "many people".

I would however appreciate some analytics data on it to have a better idea.

100% zoom is only usable on relatively large monitors with Full HD resolution or worse.

For anything with a higher DPI (including UHD/4k, but also lower resolutions), zoom is required to be able to read the text on most pages.

I run with 125% zoom on the 5+ year old iMac I use at work, and it makes a big difference.

If you'd like to see what size the fonts are with 100% zoom on a UHD monitor, try setting the zoom to 50%. You'll see.

I've run into some issues with webpages I've designed where the users are browsing at 150%-250% regularly. I'm not quite sure what to do about it. It's different than when a tablet zooms, which is literally just zooming in... browsers make things bigger (text, images, etc) and it screws with things.

The solution is called "responsive design." From your perspective, my zoomed browser just has different proportions. If your site renders well on a phone due to responsive CSS, then it should be okay in a zoomed browser too.

(I'm browsing Hacker News at 200% right now. It works great since their latest responsive fix.)

> Do you have a source for this?

I don't. However it seems odd to think people wouldn't zoom in a document viewer.

Let's get some real numbers though: I just asked Addy Osmani on Twitter if there are stats for this, since window.devicePixelRatio changes with zoom.

Do 90% of web users know that this is a document viewer?

Yes. Most people on the internet have heard words like 'web page' before. Hopefully zooming awareness should on the same order of magnitude as scrolling awareness, although it's probably less since scrolling was implemented first.

Do you have a source to support many users browse at 100% zoom?

Based on discoverability of zoom and the effort cost of adjusting the zoom of every site, I'd bet a lot of money on the vast majority of users in the world browse at 100% zoom over all others setting solely on the basis that it's the default setting (or 'laziest setting') and not easily discoverable.

Zooming should be as common a sanity check for web pages as viewing on a tablet or a 320px wide mobile phone should be, IMO.

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