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How to Disable Internet Explorer Pinch-Zoom on Your Touchscreen Kiosk

Disable pinch-zoom on your Windows web browser kioskIf your Windows touchscreen kiosk is using the Internet Explorer WebBrowser Control you might want to consider disabling the user’s ability to “pinch-zoom” since it can cause readability issues.  Pinch-zoom can be a useful feature, especially when interacting with the web browser, but it can also cause confusion in a touchscreen kiosk environment since not all users are familiar with the pinch-zoom functionality.  Imagine the scenario where one user zooms in on the webpage and walks away, then the next user has no idea how to zoom back out to 100%.  Fortunately it’s easy to disable pinch-zoom in the Internet Explorer WebBrowser Control from the Windows registry and I’ll outline the steps below.

Disabling pinch zoom in the Internet Explorer WebBrowser Control:

  1. Launch the Windows registry editor
  2. Navigate to “HKEY_CURRENT_USERSoftwareMicrosoftInternet ExplorerZoom” (HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE works also).
  3. Create a DWORD value named “ZoomDisabled” and set it’s value to 1.
  4. Restart your kiosk application

Setting ZoomDisabled to 1 disables pinch-zoom

According to my testing this only seems to disable pinch-zoom for my kiosk application (which uses the Internet Explorer WebBrowser Control) but does not disable pinch-zoom in the native Internet Explorer web browser.  This leads me to believe that this setting only applies to the Internet Explorer WebBrowser Control which is what I’m using in our kiosk software for Windows to render the kiosk’s content.

Andrew Savala
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Author: Andrew Savala

Andrew Savala is the CEO of RedSwimmer, with a background in designing and deploying complex payment kiosk systems. Andrew offers high-value, strategic consulting services to companies looking to develop their payment kiosks.