Full Page Zoom
June 9th, 2008 by seth bindernagel
In my opinion, one of the coolest features of Firefox 3 is full page zoom. From the View menu and via keyboard shortcuts, the new zooming feature lets you zoom in and out of entire pages, scaling the layout, text and images.
I’ve used it so many times when images or text are small and I want a scaled up view of the details. Also, I have to admit that sometimes my eyes get a little tired and it’s nice to scale text to a bigger size so I can read without focusing too closely.
How do you use Full Page Zoom?
So, before we get too far into it, here’s how to use full page zoom…
I use a Mac and love keyboard shortcuts, so I press Command and the “+” sign to zoom in. Command and the “-” sign pulls me back out. You can also go to the View –> Zoom menu and zoom in and out from there. When hitting the command “+”, I can zoom in over and over again until the image or text I am viewing scales up to the desired size. Once I am finished, I hit command “-” to take me back to the state I want.
(On a PC, you can use similar keystrokes with Ctrl + and Ctrl -. Or, go to that view menu again…)
And, if you prefer it the old way, where you can zoom in on just the text, select the “Zoom Text Only” option under the View –> Zoom –> Zoom Text Only. With that setting activated, you’re back to zooming just text.
One final note, when you zoom in and out, the state of that page persists. If you navigate away from the site but come back to it later, the zoom state will remain. This can be very handy for many reasons, not the least of which is accessibility. Readers who prefer a much larger text for reading will not have to re-zoom every time they visit their favorite sites.
What’s in that tide pool?
Let me give an example of how I have used this recently. My friend Jordan puts all of his wonderful photography on his site he calls Nomadic Planet. Recently, Jordan has started experimenting with high dynamic range photography (or HDR for short). HDR allows photographers to take several photographs with different light settings to create a more dynamic range of exposures. Nifty software allows the photographer to then combine all those shots into one, resulting in a final photograph with a depth of field that shows great detail in the foreground all the way to the background.
Jordan describes this as a beautiful sunset at the end of the road in north Kau’i at Ke’e Beach State Park in Hanalei, Hawaii. It’s a 3-exposure HDR taken on April 27, 2008.
But, I really like tide pools. And, because Jordan’s HDR technique provides so much detail in the entire landscape, I want to zoom in on the bottom left corner to see if I can find any little shells or starfish or whatever.
Voila, FULL PAGE ZOOOOOOOMMM!!!!!
Here’s the shot from my browser (I uploaded the screenshots to Flickr to allow me blog this…)
Anyone see a starfish? I don’t. But, thanks to full page zoom, I was able to get very close to the area I wanted to investigate.
Want more technical background on it?
Robert O’Callahan did two interesting posts about this feature a while back. The first post you might want to read came in February of 2007 and discusses a patch landed by Eli Friedman that “is a major cleanup of the way we work with length units in Gecko.” The second post worth reading again discusses the behavior the zoom implementation.
Without a shred of knowledge about this computer science behind this feature, I found these two posts really interesting. Thanks to Roc for passing them my way as background.
It’s sad that this “wonderful” feature simply don’t work in Linux. And the excuse is always the same: X don’t support this, Adobe don’t that, etc.
I’m just a user, but really doubt that you cannot add this feature at application level, even with some performance penalty.
Bye.
@drz_0, I’m running Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy) with Firefox 3 (latest nightlies), and I have had no problems with full page zoom. It works fine for me. How are you invoking it? Ctrl-+, Ctrl–, and Ctrl-0 all do proper full page zooming. It’s a tad slow, but it does work.
Sorry, but I was no clear: the full page zoom is there, but there is no filtering in the images, so it’s almost useless (for me).
Anyway, this version is great.
Seth, use my Glazoom extension, you’ll love full zoom even more
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/6489
Forgot to mention that Command (or CTRL) “0″ takes you back to the normal state.
I have to second drz_0. Full page zoom is unusable on linux because of the lack of performance and filtering. No clue why you couldn’t just use your own filtering until X would support it.
“One final note, when you zoom in and out, the state of that page persists. If you navigate away from the site but come back to it later, the zoom state will remain.”
Although you should remember that this means that the site name is stored in your profile, and will stay there even if you clear your history, which may be a privacy concern for some. You can remove these stored settings by going back to the same site and resetting the zoom.
This is my favorite feature in Firefox 3. It’s the one feature that’s useful to everyone (well, I guess the awesome bar is really useful to everyone too, but it’s less immediately clear why). Great writeup about it, Seth!
wow… Great Photography!! your friend is very talented. I zoomed into your zoomed in picture… didn’t see any goods in the water. They are in there somewhere….
David: It’s not clear to me that the awesomebar is useful to everyone. Indeed, it seems to go out of its way to impede usability by conflating unrelated functionalities in a way that makes them all harder to use. For instance, I cannot fathom the degree of confusion that must exist in the mind of anyone who thought it was a good idea to combine the UI for searching bookmarks with the one for entering URLs. Maybe next we will integrate back/forward functionality into the scrollbars (”stupendousbars”) and send email from the Print Preview screen (”excellent preview”).
However, given that every web content developer seems to have his own ideas about scale, Full Page Zoom should be useful to practically anyone who knows how to use it. It certainly should be an improvement over plain text zoom, and I’d consider the web unusable without that, so.
To the people saying that lack of filtering makes this useless on X: can you explain what kind of filtering it lacks and why that hampers its usefulness?
I have mousewheel.withshiftkey.action set to “3″ which seems to default to page zoom. Don’t know if there is a way to get text only zoom (so far like the page zoom though). But for some reason the direction you move the wheel to get zoom-in has been reversed from previous ff versions. (It’s now opposite from Tbird for example.)
@scott s., you might try looking at http://support.mozilla.com and if there is not something in the knowledge base that can help, please submit a question. Honestly, I do not use a mouse (use a touchpad. And, I assume you use a mouse since you reference mousewheel.withshiftkey.action.) and am not sure what problem you might be facing.
I love that blogs index in search engines so well. I just did a search for “can I zoom out of my firefox browser” and your blog post came up. Your post answered my question. The great part is that it is a relevant answer that’s not 3 years old. Thank you very much ;o)
About a year ago, I spent the better part of a day making this site’s layout entirely em based and set on a vertical baseline grid… No, I mean, everything is em based: font-sizes, borders, margins, padding, widths, everything. Each individual value in the stylesheet that specifies a vertical measurement was manually calculated based on the relative value of an em on the specific element.
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