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After writing a great big answer to the question Is it bad to work with pixels in CSS? in which I concluded that there's normally nothing wrong with it provided you understand the limitations, I started to wonder about how many people have the default font size set to something other than 16px.

I imagine that there would be some users who change it due to either poor eyesight or high pixel density monitors (like those with 1920*1080 screens on 15" laptops) (or maybe just because they like larger text). There also may be some devices (handheld devices?) that have the default font size set to something else, but this is purely conjecture on my part.

My question is: does anybody know any statistics on what percentage of users have the default browser font size set to something other than 16px?

Community
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David Johnstone
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3 Answers3

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This avoids answering your question, but IMHO such statistics shouldn't matter even if it were near zero percent.

Even if 16px were the de-facto standard, you should start from the position that this is something that the designer doesn't ultimately control, and it should be left up to the user to choose their font size. Your decision process should lead to designs that are flexible based on the user's needs.

Andrew Vit
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  • Lots of people say to just use rems and make your designs relative to the user's selected font size. Issue with this, however, is rounding. For example if you want a gap to be 8px, you would put 0.5rem. But then if the user increases their font size to 17, your gap will still be 8px. If you're trying to center something, this can be a real issue. – Chris Smith Oct 03 '19 at 15:31
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I'm not sure if you've found much by way of google but this search bought up this page as hit 1: http://www.oreillynet.com/xml/blog/2006/03/more_statistics_on_user_clicks.html

Incidentally this question is on page one of the search too :)

Its from 2006, but the first bit has a little about the font size settings in IE.

I doubt there is any documented data for this specific thing.

One thing I can tell you is that in over 10 years of working around computers I've seen about 1 in 10 users having a above default DPI setting. eg. 120 that caused the font size to be bigger than 16px in their browser. It also caused layouts that weren't styled properly to break.

Moin Zaman
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  • 1 in 10 seems about right in my experience as well, maybe a little lower like 1 in 15 at my current job. I think it would be higher if more people realized the could change it. – Brad Mace Oct 04 '10 at 16:40
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Late reply to the question; Defining your font size to a fixed size (px) or (pt) would mean that your site visitor can't increase the size of your Web page text. You might say "great", but this doesn't allow someone with visual disabilities to adjust browser settings to increase font size. If you're designing a website for the general public or for the government, this is a big "no-no".

To be on the safe side use relative measurements (em) or (%) that allow for font adjustment in a browser.

Dmosso
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    I have yet to see a browser that offers a zoom feature that doesn't properly scale elements specified in pixel sizes (even text). Zoom in nearly every case means "zoom everything on the page". Even so, a separate text zoom feature would easily scale pixel text. – Beejor Aug 05 '16 at 00:53
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    The existence of zoom is not an argument for ignoring the users preferences. If the user has set a large default font size it's probably because they need/prefer that. If you always buy large print books (i.e. set large default font) , it would you not be pissed if the "large print" book actually contained microscopic text and a magnifying glass (zoom function)? – Stein G. Strindhaug Sep 07 '16 at 09:23
  • @SteinG.Strindhaug The printed book analogy doesn't work because modern browsers remember the zoom level per page. Also, using a magnifying glass implies that additional, cumbersome work has to be done to read - which is not the case with the browser's page zoom, it just works. The way browsers zoom nowadays effectively negated the "respect user preference" argument. – timotgl Jul 08 '22 at 09:56