Page zoom has been completely reworked for Firefox 3 and now includes both full page and text only zoom.
Full page zoom scales the page layout and structure while allowing you complete control over the size of the displayed content. Text only zoom, on the other hand, only zooms the text on a page, leaving the images and page layout untouched.
A new and extremely useful feature of page zoom is that Firefox now automatically remembers the zoom level you set on a per-site basis. Once you zoom in to (or out of) a page on a site, Firefox will remember and restore that zoom level the next time you visit any page that is part of that site.
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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.
