Page zoom slows down page rendering

Question

I'm building a map viewer much like Google maps and i've run into an interesting performance problem when a page is zoomed (ie ctrl + OR ctrl -). It seems to affect all major browsers but Firefox has the worst problems as far as I can tell.

The problem is that when the page is zoomed panning by dragging the mouse seems really sluggish. This can even be seen on Google maps. Pan the map left and right and note how smooth it is. Now press ctrl+ (3 or 4 times). Now pan the map left and right in the same way. Notice the difference?

Does anyone know how I can minimize this problem?

Answer 1

We'll since the browser needs to rescale and compute all assets, there's no real way of "fixing" this behavior.

Every browser (and IE7+) uses scaling layout instead of resizing the text size when you hit CTRL+/-.