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Full Page Zoom
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.
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Mozilla student projects wrapping up in India
Chofmann and I returned from India last July with a few opportunities to work with various campuses where students had shown interest in doing “something” for Mozilla. I took a chance at setting up four different teams to do projects related to community building and market research.
As it turns out, managing student teams to do community building on the other side of the world can be difficult. But, I suspected that going in. It was best to keep my expectations fairly realistic while setting goals for the students. We accomplished some stuff with our projects, and I am still gathering final write-ups from a few of the teams. Today, I’ll focus on Team 21 from the Indian Institute of Managemenet, Ahmadebad.
Team 21, led by Vijay Haryal, jumped right into a fairly comprehensive market research plan for Mozilla. We’re going to post their final report to Spread Firefox, in the Firefox in India Group. Once we have listed the report there, please download it and read for your enjoyment.
The initial goal of the team:
To develop a marketing plan for the launch of Firefox 3 customized to the needs of the Indian community.
This was an ambitious goal, and I can say that we did not quite create a marketing plan for the launch of Firefox 3, but we learned a great deal from the students about the Web and Internet culture in India.
The team started by addressing the language issue in India. I’ve blogged about this before, but a crucial aspect to understand about the Indian Internet culture that is different from other countries is the existence of over 20 languages spoken regularly by different groups within the country. The team looked at the pros and cons of localizing Firefox in multiple languages and later surveyed users about this issue.
Additionally, the team created a plan for their market research. It was fairly straightforward:
- Research frequent user behavior to identify some key attributes of Indian Web users through in-depth interviews and focus groups
- Validate what we learn about the attributes by looking at the demographics of those surveyed and interviewed
- Analyze the data
- Present the findings
All of this is explained in further detail in the forthcoming report we’ll post on Spread Firefox. When it is loaded there, I’ll link to it. (If you want an advance copy, email me or comment here and I will send you a .PDF)
Here are some main findings from Team 21:
- Position Mozilla as a more secure browser. To back it up, reach out to various financial institutions, encouraging them to enable their sites to allow secure banking transactions. According to what Team 21 found, Indian users can only use IE to complete their banking transactions.
- Also, in order to make Firefox look and feel “more Indian”, in addition to the en-IN version proposed, Firefox should ensure that Hindi and Tamil fonts render properly
- Factor analysis shows that the users can be categorized into two main segments – one which is seeking technical features like compatibility & security, and the other which is seeking a browser with a more “Indian feel”
- Mozilla should start an evangelism campaign to convince Indian web and content developers to make their sites compatible
- India-specific user preferences, like addons for travel websites, should be promoted or included in some bundled download
I thought these were particularly helpful action points to learn about users in India.
In closing, this was a great project to do with the student team. They did many things that got them involved quickly in the Mozilla community. They took time to understand how we work by doing simple tasks like logging into Bugzilla and commenting on bugs. They hosted regular calls with us via VoIP software. They wrote many progress reports and sent them to us, copying their advisers. Thanks, Team 21, for making the 13 hour time zone difference seamless.
Vijay has indicated that he would like to stay involved in some capacity. As an engineering student who returned to business school, I hope he does because he has both the technical background and the business acumen to help spread Mozilla in India. Thanks for leading the project, Vijay!
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Web strategist, Jeremiah Owyang, at Mozilla
I’ve blogged about Jeremiah before and how we met at the >Play Digital Media conference held at Berkeley each year. Since then, Jeremiah and I kept in touch over email, Facebook, occasional Twitter feeds, etc. (He’s a web strategist…what do you expect, right?) After a few exchanges, I took Jeremiah up on an initial offer he made to do a brown bag discussion at Mozilla about various topics where he his expertise crosses-over with Mozilla.
From a few different people, I heard that Jeremiah’s discussion today was one of the better lunchtime chats we’ve had in a while. It was mostly due to Jeremiah’s facilitation skills and a lively crowd at lunch. In our planning for the session, Jeremiah forwarded me a few ideas and specifically asked that the expectation be set that the conversation would be two-way. I hope we satisfied his hopes and I think we did.
Our team gathered around the downstairs couches and had a pretty engaging conversation about user experience, product, and marketing for Mozilla. What was most interesting to me was that we continued to focus on the international aspects of each of these subjects. What is Mozilla doing to market itself in places like Japan, China, Europe, and the United States? Is it different across cultures? How do we localize our products beyond language translation? What are we doing to engage user (customer) feedback into our product development process?
Overall, I think we had knowledgeable responses and insights and the conversation flowed nicely. We honed in on Mozilla’s historic marketing focus on early adopters and how they can become big brand advocates to help spread our products virally. Although it would be great to have a robust marketing budget to also touch mainstream consumers, I’ll be one of many to tell you that we are never going to fund a commercial for the Super Bowl or anything like that. Jeremiah seemed really interested in points made by people like Gen (Japan) and Tristan (Europe) and John (U.S./China), who all discussed similarities of early adopters across cultures.
Before I knew it, the hour was up. As he closed the conversation, Jeremiah posted a few challenges for our team:
1) How is Mozilla going to move its marketing beyond focus on early adopters?
2) What other strategies outside of word of mouth does or will Mozilla do to spread its products?
3) What localized (yet globally deployed) tools will we create better marketing collaboration and feedback from our users?
4) Technographics studies indicate different users need different products, how will Mozilla respond (esp in growth markets like China and India)?A great lunch conversation. Thanks, Jeremiah!
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How we decided upon FOSS.IN
If you’ve been following this blog, you may have seen some posts over the past few months about Mozilla’s participation in India’s largest open source conference, FOSS.IN. Our initial planning culminated with Mozilla’s project day proposal being accepted by the FOSS.IN planning team. That was exciting.
What did I learn in this process, and what, if any, valuable takeaways from this process are worth sharing?
Here goes…
This is one of the first major events that I helped take a lead role in planning. Mary Colvig is our event planning manager and has been a long standing member of Mozilla’s marketing team. (If she had a blog, I’d link to her…but no…though she’s thought about it, apparently.) Mary’s brought some nice rigor to this process.
Here are some things we agreed were important for this trip to succeed:
- Create clear goals and potential outcomes if we were to participate;
- Enlist key constituents from the Mozilla community and Mozilla Corporation to help in the decision process;
- Host weekly, purposeful meetings to discuss updates;
- Divide tasks among all involved in planning;
- Carefully craft and adhere to a budget;
- Gather approval from senior staff that we should do this.
I had a few clear cut goals that I knew I wanted to push if we were to participate.
- Riding the momentum from our trip to India in late July, use FOSS.IN to grow, build, cultivate our Indian developer community;
- To get as many Indian localizers together so we can add a few more languages to our list of localized languages;
- To test Firefox in India, creating an evangelism community who can either help file bugs and/or reach out to web developers who sites might not work on Firefox;
- To explore and learn about other issues for Indian Web users that will help us better serve users in the region (fonts and font rendering has been an issue in the past…likely to change with Firefox 3).
To accomplish these goals, we proposed the project day, a large undertaking by me, Mary, Chofmann and a few others. I wrote the first draft of the proposed events, sent it around for feedback, incorporated that, and then finalized the proposal. We were then accepted. After a few enthusiastic meetings, we were suddenly in the midsts of many moving pieces seeming to come from different directions, all colliding at one intersection. (random picture illustrating how we felt…)
From one side, we had FOSS.IN asking us to prove that this would be a valuable, contributor-focused day. The conference organizers were NOT interested in having another discussion about a product or applications of a product. They asked us to come to the project day with some interesting projects to work on. They wanted us to get into the code and work!
Another side came from a set of key decision makers we asked to help think about this day. The questions we repeatedly had to answer,
- ”What value will this bring to the Mozilla community?”
- ”Is this a good use of resources and is it a leveraged way to build and empower community members?”
- ”If someone is going, is it a good use of their time or would their time be better used elsewhere?”
- ”How will each Mozilla participant contribute to an effective project day?”
- ”What are the deliverables of this event?”
Finally, we had emails from contributors, colleagues, and new friends asking how they could participate in the day and where their talents could be used. With an approved project day and set of events, we had to figure out how to incorporate everyone and meet everyone’s objectives.
Moving parts.
What lesson did I reinforce? As always, get buy-in. Have clear goals that are both valuable to Mozilla and attainable. Collaborate openly. Be creative. Communicate. Sure, you might think these are so obvious. They probably are. But, tying clear goals and outcomes like these to event planning is something we are trying to do more systematically. For FOSS.IN, it’s worked for the planning. We’ll see how the day goes in early December.
And, if you’re going to be in Bangalore for the conference, please do consider attending our project day. I think it will be a huge success.
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Speaking on behalf of Mozilla at the >Play conference
On Saturday, October 27, I had the chance to speak on a panel titled Consumer Internet in the Asian Theater at the >Play conference hosted by Berkeley’s Haas School of Business.
Pkim and I were asked by the student organizers to find someone to speak on this panel because of Mozilla’s community building efforts in Asia (Mozilla Japan, Li in China, and our Mozilla friends in Taiwan). Due to my interaction with many community members in these regions, I RSVP-ed to the organizers that I would speak on the panel, letting them know that Mozilla is focused on both what is best for its users and what is best for a free and open web.
The panel had some really interesting and fascinating participants, including Jeremiah who you might know through his blog titled www.web-strategist.com. At first, I felt like Mozilla might be misplaced speaking on a panel about consumer strategy (focusing on things like maximizing ad revenues) in Asia. But as the panel evolved, it became pretty apparent that many companies face the very same issues as Mozilla (or anyone) when entering these markets. A couple takeaways:
- Start by trying to understand the culture. Whenever an organization has decided to enter, explore, or community build in a new country, the panel agreed that it is important to focus on “technographics” (term used by Jeremiah). Every culture has different technographics. Each panelist contributed to this idea with anecdotes from experiences, noting that it is critical to understand why people are motivated to use the Internet, what type of technology is that new market accustomed to using, and how will people in that new market use that technology. Mobile, browsers, search engines were all discussed.
- When possible, place decision making into local hands. Each panelist seemed to have a story that relayed how they were able to enter a new market because they empower local decision making. I shared a bit about my recent trip to India, pointing out that all ongoing activity we have with our community in India right now (localizing, community building, marketing) is being driven by local members there.
- Don’t force a style or strategy that might have worked elsewhere. Perhaps this aligns with the first point, but it was hammered home a few times. The panel agreed that it is so important to get on the ground and see how people are using the Internet. At one point, we discussed how social networking differs in places like the United States (a la the Facebook-Poke Me!-style, which is very in your face) versus a place like Japan where people often prefer to be less HEY-EVERYONE:BBLLLLAAHHHHH about themselves through social networking.
- Understand the costs or benefits of externalities when looking at new markets. A while back, Gen (Mozilla Japan) wrote a terrific post about the cost of monoculture in the Korean internet (http://blog.mozilla.com/gen/2007/02/27/the-cost-of-monoculture/). Due to external decisions by the government in Korea, users are pretty much locked into using IE for secure transactions. Panelists agreed that there are several factors that will impact entry into a new country, whether it is government decisions on policy or other external factors that influence decisions. Li Gong has an interesting write up on his blog about what it took to get the proper Mozilla name registered in China.
For some reason, I expected the stories from Mozilla to be completely different from others’ on the panel because Mozilla does have a clearly different mission. But, it became clear that whether an organization is fighting to keep the web open, or trying to optimize ad revenues through search optimization, it is important to put in a special effort in understanding culture and why people choose to do what they do on the Internet.
community website
