It’s a known issue that I hate the new zoom paradigm in Firefox 3, but someone’s posted a comment in the bug for it that brings up an interesting point. I’d comment there but I’ve done enough advocacy commenting there so I’ll post it here in hopes of getting my comment seen and generating a little discussion.
Radek ‘sysKin’ Czyz posted
I’ve been using full zoom since it became possible and I never ever missed old
weird behaviour. Image zoom might be ugly, but I manage to switch it back to
100% if I ever need to appreciate a high quality image, if I need to.Anyway, changing font size while keeping anything but font size unchanged is
conceptually as weird as doing the opposite. Either you want the page bigger or
you don’t.Bloating options or menus for that is pointless, most users don’t even open the
options dialogue in their lives (and when they do, they want to change an
option they expect there to be beforehand). People who actually understand the
difference between font size and everything-else-size are people capable of
installing extensions for whatever zoom-one-thing-but-not-other they fancy.Apologies for another advocacy post, just wanted to make it clear that there
are people with opposite views in that matter.
I copied his comment (#54) in it’s entirety so I don’t get anything out of context, but he’s brought up an interesting point. Why are we needing an extension to use text zoom rather than someone writing an extension to utilize full page zoom? Here’s a clue card for The Powers That Be: One of Firefox’s selling points has been text zoom, not full page zoom. It’s been that way for as long as this user can remember. Why the frack do we need an extension to get back to an existing goramm behavior instead of getting an extension to do something new?
The problem with page zoom vs. text zoom isn’t how easy it is to get back to 100%, it’s that sometimes the font on a page is friggin’ tiny without zooming it in, but zooming the page (with the images) doesn’t just make it more readable. It can also move the page content as images get enlarged, which can mean that we have to scroll to the left or right to see the same amount of text, which can get to be a pain in the ass after a while. Plus, and please forgive me for being a broken record, it’s not how Firefox has worked for as long as I can remember.
But wow, what an intriguing concept! Writing an extension to get Mozilla Firefox to do something new that’s not a built in function. Why hasn’t someone thought of this before? What an incredible selling point! I mean, maybe someone could even write a theme or something to let Firefox look like IE7 for people who prefer that look. Oh, wait. It’s been done.
I’m sure you guys know what I’m saying. What do you think? Am I being a stubborn old coot who refuses to change? Or am I actually making a little sense in my rants about this major change to using Firefox as we know it?
24 December 2007 at 6:07 am
No you’re being perfectly reasonable. Most of the time I don’t want to zoom the entire page I just want to increase text size very quickly. I have very good eyesight and don’t need images magnifying and therefore distorting, however I will need to increase text size when website developers have used a font size that it is too small to read comfortably.
Also as a web developer, being able to quickly see how your pages adapt to varying font sizes is very important when creating robust websites. Remember, not everyone has the default text size at 16pt. People aren’t always viewing websites via a monitor. They can be using their TV and would be sat further away and need to increase the default text size.
But you have also brought up a very good usability point here too. If they continue with the page zoom, they have to get it as good as Operas which doesn’t push content out of the page initially.
Please Mozilla, don’t make me look elsewhere. You have to bring the text zoom back for Firefox 3. Ha ha. Even IE7 has both features.
1 January 2008 at 11:21 am
I hate page zoom, too. Text basically is vector graphics, with font hints you can scale text as you want and it always looks good. A bitmap simply does not contain information to enlarge it, no algorithm whatever can enlarge a bitmap to look good. If you take a 10MB image out of your camera, resize it to 200×300, there is no way to get it back to the original size.
16 January 2008 at 9:39 am
I use text-zoom all the time, and imagine I’d rarely use page zoom at the moment (although I can quite see the use case — both for bad eyesight and high-DPI monitors) — but I am quite happy for it to be the default. It would seem to be a fantastic compromise to me if they just allowed a modifier (like shift) to be held down to just zoom the text instead of the whole page.
16 January 2008 at 2:16 pm
And therein lies the biggest problem. They didn’t give us a modifier to be able to select text zoom, other than a mousewheel zoom which still doesn’t quite seem to work right. Luckily CatThief stepped up and created the Zoomer extension, which gives us back the old style text zoom back, although it’s at the cost of page zooming.
Of course this begs the question as to why Kenji Inoue’s Page Zoom extension wasn’t good enough for people who wanted that behavior. Or were there so many people asking it to be rolled into Firefox that the devs simply didn’t realize how much trouble they’d be starting by changing the default zoom behavior.
There is a possible fix that brings the ability to select which zoom behavior you want from the View menu, but as of yesterday’s nightly it still isn’t available in an official nightly build, even though it was proposed almost a month ago. Granted, all hands were on plugging up memory leaks, but the memory leak issue seems pretty under control (thanks to everyone who coded!) so hopefully someone will get that patch folded into the trunk (branch?) soon.
21 February 2008 at 9:47 am
Hi. I’m a free software advocate but opera was far better for my needs. Firefox 3 has become lighter, smaller and has the zoom I need cause I work on high DPI screens so I finally can switch.
I was very surprised to find that the keyboard shortcut was the same as text size! my reaction was: how do we change text size? mmmmm.
Text size as other sizes on a web page are designer’s decision. if i watch the page on a higher-than-expected-resolution-for-the-designer I have to adapt. Firefox should keep the possibility of changing text size independently of other sizes(it would be nice to be able to change textbox sizes). But i suspect many designers are going to be VERY happy if their designs dont need to be checked to work at different text sizes.
21 February 2008 at 12:00 pm
Firefox has had this ability for quite some time thanks to the Page Zoom extension. From what I’m seeing in the latest nightly you can have the hotkeys control either page zoom or text zoom, but not both at the same time. They are working on a bug that has the zoom percentage jump when switching between the two styles of zoom, but it will definitely be fixed by the time Fx3 is released later this year.
4 March 2008 at 7:58 am
Page zoom is really much better than text zoom, let me tell you.
I have being coping with the later for a long time and was dreaming of page zoom (did not know there was an extension to do it back then).
When I discovered that possibility with IE7, I thought it was fantastic and check out how to have the same with Firefox.
Whereas Text Zoom dramatically degrades the overall layout of most sites (try text zooming various 3 column layout newspapers and see how many are coded properly for proportional zoom…).
The website I do myself did not do it properly either, and I am now relieved that it won’t be necessary anymore to recode them entirely to address the issue as I was planning to do someday.
6 March 2008 at 3:20 pm
Add my voice to those hoping that text-zoom will also be a possibility, if not the default, in FF3. I loathe the page-zoom “feature” in IE7, and I use the text-zoom on practically every page I visit (sometimes to make text smaller, usually to make it bigger). Please leave my text-zoom alone!
6 March 2008 at 3:41 pm
Text zoom is in Beta 4 that’s coming out soon. Page zoom is still the default, but text zoom is finally available. I’ll give the built-in text zoom a try so that when I pass along news that Firefox 3.0b4 gets released (I’d tell you now but I keep forgetting to disable Zoomer.) I can let you know what I think of it. As it is I love how Zoomer has given me back my text zoom. NO matter what Opera and IE decided to do (and I hear IE8′s zoom is better than IE7′s) I’m glad to see that the Firefox devs have realized that we consider text zoom a must have. Although something tells me I’ll be keeping CatThief’s Zoomer installed long past the official release of Firefox 3. Even if the built in zoom works fine, the toolbar icons available with Zoomer are even better than the ones the Quick Zoom extension provide.
19 May 2008 at 4:44 am
Text zoom changes the page proportions and is the wrong way to zoom.
If there is an unfortunate combination of low-resolution bitmaps and low resolution screens and you want to see individual pixels you can save and view the bitmap in any image viewer. Hopefully sites will use higher res bitmaps, or else more vector graphics, or else screen dpi will increase, but even with none of this page proportions are the most important thing to maintain for a website viewer.
19 May 2008 at 8:28 am
Actually if a web designer sets their page up properly with CSS styles text zooming won’t affect the page layout. Zooming the entire page does, however, make the entire page large enough that it easily can become impossible to read the content without having to scroll horizontally, regardless of how well a designer sets up their divisions and styles.
And of course viewing images, whether high- or low-resolution, has nothing to do with text zoom. But thanks for your comment, CSMR.
28 May 2008 at 10:59 am
Textzoom always felt very unintuitive, and it behaved clumsy at best. I am all for replacing it what I consider a intuitive zooming feature.
31 May 2008 at 3:02 pm
Add my voice to the “I loathe text zoom” crowd.
I’ve always hated the way most web browsers handled so-called “zooming”. Sometimes when I needed to zoom, I would just sit closer because if I zoomed in, the page practically “exploded” in a jumbled mess of oddly sized elements. When you resize a page, EVERYTHING SHOULD GO WITH IT. It makes no sense to lave the images and Flash objects behind.
I was so happy to see that IE7 did something like scaling the images. I was even happier when they “fixed” the Zoom function in Firefox – in fact, on my living room computer (where people sit several feet away from the screen), I installed Opera so people can get functional page zoom. It was buggy at best and Opera wasn’t compatible with most sites, but it could zoom properly.
Now, I’m trying to find a way to set a global zoom level for Firefox on my Asus Eee PC (running FF3 RC1 on WinXP SP3). I need to zoom _out_ in order to fit many websites properly on this tiny screen. It works great whenever I zoom out, but it stores that info for that one site only and I want it to apply to everything (especially so I don’t end up with “surprises” when it “remembers” the zoom level for a site I was on long ago). The zoom level should apply globally, plain and simple. To avoid problems, a visual notification should appear regarding the zooming, so people don’t end up thinking “why is everything so big/small?”. But having each site’s zoom level remembered is just going to cause further problems. IMO.
3 June 2008 at 3:49 am
pro page zoom,
although on ubuntu hardy heron FF3 RC1, scaled images are looking crappy.
I hope, for the final release they will use a better algorithm.
3 June 2008 at 7:43 am
To Kai and others saying the image zoom in Firefox 3 needs work:
You should definitely search through Bugzilla to make sure the problem has been reported, and then vote for the bug. I doubt it will be fixed for Firefox 3 final since they’re in release candidate mode, but hopefully it can be fixed in Firefox 3.1 (or whatever they’re calling the next fix version). That’s really the only way the devs will know it needs fixing.
17 June 2008 at 5:56 am
I hate full page zoom – its horrible.
I use nosquint and that lets me control the “text zoom” and “fullpage zoom” correctly.
It also has a nice status bar tool for quick access.