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[UPDATED: Things have changed with later nightly builds. Details are below. -Peng]
One of the biggest changes coming in Firefox 3 is the switch from being able to switch the text with the keyboard to zooming the entire page, and it’s no secret that this tester is not happy with the change (nor are a lot of other testers). But someone came out with an extension that could make us a little happier.
Mozilla tester CatThief has put together the Zoomer extension that
… adds “Zoom In”, “Zoom Out”, and “Zoom Reset” toolbar buttons for handling the size of page text. It also replaces the Zoom menuitems and keyset full-zoom commands with text-zoom commands. Zoomer will not zoom images!
I’ve tested it out, and it’s a start but it’s still not a real solution. Not only does it not work with key combinations like has been the case with Firefox 2 (and before), I’m still finding that the zoom is zooming in more than strictly just the text. When using it on Gmail I found that the sidebar is getting expanded to the point of pushing my message list far enough to the left that I still have to scroll.
But still, it’s a step in the right direction and I applaud CatThief for putting creating this extension. For more information, and to test it in your installation of Firefox 3, visit CatThief’s Firefox Extensions page. But please do not use this extension if you’re running Firefox2. It’s only for Firefox 3. If you want buttons to zoom the text of Firefox 2 I recommend using the Quick Zoom extension.
Updated 7 January 8:09 ET: Late last night I fired up the 5 January nightly build of Firefox 3 (Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9b3pre) Gecko/2008010504 Minefield/3.0b3pre ID:200801050) and it seems the newer build includes some fixes I hadn’t noticed before. The standard shortcut keys (Ctrl-+/-/0) do in fact work, plus Gmail’s sidebar navigation panel no longer expands like it did when I first tried Zoomer. I’d think perhaps it was because I was inadvertently using an older profile, but Zoomer was installed so it must have simply been a build issue and a fix that hadn’t made its way down the pipeline yet.
Now this is what I expect from Firefox. I can control text zooming from my keyboard or mouse, and if I need an image zoomed I can use the development version of the Image Zoom extension (that works with Firefox 3). And of course I can still use the zoom feature in Compiz Fusion (since I am a happy Ubuntu Gutsy user) when I need it.
I already asked Nanc to verify that what I’m saying works for her as well and it’s not just something on my comp. If all goes well I may be singing a much different tune about Firefox 3 when the next beta comes out than I have so far. Not all of my extensions have been updated to work with Firefox 3 yet, and none of my themes have been, but we’re only at beta 2 (actually the nightlies are beta 3pre) so I’m not that surprised.
Although I’m still waiting to get a good reason why The Powers That Be at Mozilla decided to change the zoom function in the first place. I’m also waiting to see a suggested fix for the View menu to make it into the nightly builds, but since I have Zoomer working properly it’s not as big a deal as it was before. Getting the menu changed, that is, not the reason. I still want to hear an official “logic” that prompted the change in zoom methodology, even if they want to take a page from SecondLife’s playbook and keep that salacious little tidbit to themselves.
Updated 2 July 8:15 am: I meant to close the comments on this post when I closed comments on my other Firefox 3 posts last week. What’s next?
