Adaptive Zoom is also aimed at low-mobility and visually impaired users. It scales elements of a Web page before the page is laid out in the screen, which is different from the zoom function in IE7. IE7 magnifies Web pages, scaling elements post-layout and then redrawing them on the screen. But that means users often have to scroll horizontally as well as vertically to view the full enlarged page.

By scaling elements pre-layout, IE8 will redraw the page and adjust the content to avoid displaying horizontal scroll bars, Gonzalez-Castellan wrote. This makes it easier to browse zoomed pages because a user only has to scroll up and down, and not left and right. An example of what this looks like is available on .

High DPI is also a revision of an existing IE7 feature. DPI, or dots per inch, is a measure of how dense are the individual droplets of ink -- or pixels on a computer display -- that make up an image.

In IE7, the ability to zoom content on a Web page did not match the DPI Scaling settings in Windows, which allow for images to be viewed at a larger setting than do the browser zoom settings. IE8 will automatically match the DPI Scaling settings, resulting in improved image scaling on Web pages.

Microsoft expects to ship the final version of IE8 early next year. It recently sent an update of the current test build to select beta testers and expects to release one more public test version of IE8 before its final release.