what is the most common font setting in IE

[scorpion]

What is the most common font setting in IE. I know its hard to tell. I leave it at <medium> but any stats on this? It would be good to know what should be a good base font size. Also I notice netscape is TOTALLY different than IE. What looks readable on IE you need a magnifying glass in Netscape 7 at 100% font size!

[Brett_Tabke]

I don't think there is anyway to tell from the page or js is there?

I'd guess medium with a pretty signficant number selecting the next higher font size. Micro fonts are one of the most often complained about problems with the v5+ browser set.

Besides, if you use css to set the font size for ie, there is nothing they can do to get around that.

[jatar_k]

>>netscape is TOTALLY different than IE

also keep in mind that pc is totally different than mac. If memory serves, Mac is usually a little smaller. A small size on pc will result in unreadable on mac.

[Nick_W]

Small correction there Brett:

If you use px units or pt which are fixed font units IE users can't resize.

If you use em, or any other relative font unit such as %'s then they have no trouble at all....

The best CSS font size in my opinion is 1em -- The browser default: eg. what the user has set it to in there pref's. That's a hard and somewhat idealistic rule to follow though and I must admit to not always following my own advice ;)

Nick

[indiechild]

The most common MSIE font setting is medium (View ¦ Text size > Medium). If a user changes it to something else, they did so deliberately for their own benefit (tired eyes, bad vision etc).

In any case, it's not something that concerns webdesigners, because they should give control to the users, not take it away from them.

Always use relative "em" units for font size, not "px" or something else. It's maddening to visit sites with tiny fonts that you can't enlarge because the webdesigners used "px" units.

If you use "em" units, your text will display at the same size on IE5+, Mozilla/NS6+, Opera 5+ (not sure about previous versions)... I've tested my pages on Windows and Linux, and the font sizes stay the same. Of course this is not true for NS4 and IE4, but that's not exactly news.