gHacks technology news » firefox zoom http://www.ghacks.net A technology blog covering software, mobile phones, gadgets, security, the Internet and other relevant areas. Mon, 23 Nov 2009 22:22:46 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.6 en hourly 1 Firefox 3 Site Specific Zoom http://www.ghacks.net/2009/02/24/firefox-3-site-specific-zoom/ http://www.ghacks.net/2009/02/24/firefox-3-site-specific-zoom/#comments Tue, 24 Feb 2009 08:14:44 +0000 Martin http://www.ghacks.net/?p=10732 The last article about Firefox’s zoom capabilities received several interesting comments about the zoom function. What many users who commented did not know was that the zooming behavior changed in Firefox 3. It is still possible to zoom in or out of a website using keyboard shortcuts or the Firefox menu but observant visitors will notice that the zoom level seems to get saved on a per-domain basis. This means that the actual zoom level will always be saved in Firefox 3 and therefor be displayed whenever the user visits a page on the domain.

In short: Firefox 3 will remember the current zoom level and display any page on the domain in it. This can lead to all kinds of troubles if a user does not know that Firefox 3 stores that setting. There is however a new parameter in the Firefox configuration that can be changed to disable the automatic storage of zoom levels in Firefox 3.

Type [about:config] in the Firefox 3 location bar and filter for the following term: browser.zoom.siteSpecific. The default value for the parameter is true which means that the feature is enabled. To disable it simply double-click the entry so that it changes to false. This has the effect that Firefox 3 will not remember the zoom level and display all websites in default view.

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]]> http://www.ghacks.net/2009/02/24/firefox-3-site-specific-zoom/feed/ 3 How To Zoom In Firefox http://www.ghacks.net/2009/02/23/how-to-zoom-in-firefox/ http://www.ghacks.net/2009/02/23/how-to-zoom-in-firefox/#comments Mon, 23 Feb 2009 16:55:46 +0000 Martin http://www.ghacks.net/?p=10723 I recently had two conversations with Firefox users who did not know that Firefox came with the means to zoom in and out of a website. They were using external applications to magnify parts of the screen and where surprised that they could achieve the same effect with less work.

All of the zooming options are available from the View menu in Firefox. Firefox users find options to zoom in, zoom out and restore the default level in the Zoom submenu there. There is also one additional option to change the default zoom behavior to only zoom the text of a website. The default behavior is to zoom all elements of a website. Not many users will use the View > Zoom menu though to zoom in Firefox. It simply takes to long which is why the same effect can be achieved with keyboard shortcuts:

  • Zoom in: [CTRL +] or [CTRL Mousewheel up]
  • Zoom out: [CTRL -] or [CTRL Mousewheel down]
  • Reset Zoom: [CTRL 0]

The keyboard shortcuts come in really handy if you stumble upon badly designed websites or those that use images or other elements that are barely decipherable in default view. The only thing that one should realize is that the zoom level works on a domain basis. Multiple pages of the same domain that are opened in different tabs will all be effected by the zoom.

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