Chromium (the development build of Chrome) does full page resizing better than any other browser I’ve tried. It even scales the canvas element perfectly!
I agree that full page zoom should be the default, but I do think that font zoom is a nice feature too. Matter of fact, I read this page right now with +4 or something like that. I just prefer a big font for reading long blogposts. It’s nice that Firefox remembers the zoom settings for each page, so I can read my blogs in a huge font, but can view other sites where the layout is more important and there is less text in the default resolution.
Hi,
Phew - what a backlash!
I have to join in
Mostly the sites I design and use are for reading - online journals, encyclopaedia etc. I can’t read properly at normal font size - but I don’t need all the nav and furniture big, just the text content I’m trying to digest.
So I whack up the font size and let the other element break.
What I really want is to ONLY increase the main content text.
Zooming the whole page really sucks, and it’s my main bugbear with browsing on the iPhone. I hate having to drag a page around to see what’s on both side or the full line of text.
Lou.
@Jeff Yeah, well, tell that to Safari and Chrome, man., responding to Elijah:
You do realize that it has been entirely possible to zoom in on anything on the screen on Mac OS X since well before the first public release right? And that was like 8 years ago.
Apple’s zoom does indeed include anything displayed in Safari. The only drawback is that it’s a scaled bitmap you’re panning over, but the smoothing is the best i’ve ever seen so everything remains more than legible. Still, I do hope they’ll be able to integrate a real text zoom into OS X soon.
with full page zoom, images get blurier …
I think we are witnessing a transition from e-Text (classic html with sortof-semantic elements) to e-Paper (which used to be done with PDF). Personally I preferred the old way where you just told the browser I want a heading, now some text oh and now an image. Granted - it didn’t look as good as today’s sites but it scales nicely to different device types.
Those old sites work perfectly in mobile browsers like Opera Mobile, while those DHTMLed, DIVed and CSSed pages require full-page zoom and require horizontal panning all the time.
Two things I think you miss is that
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It’s easier to read (and especially scan) text in relatively narrow column (I think there are even papers on that). Unfortunately, web designers have never heard of that, and lines on most sites are ridiculously long; text zoom makes lines shorter, full site zoom doesn’t have consistent effect and usually resizes everything just like in your example - I agree that text-zoomed digg looks much better
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Many sites develop horizontal scrollbar on full zoom even after one go - so if you just need to increase font size to see the text you’re screwed.
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I don’t even know why you want to resize all this other stuff at all? What’s the point in resizing anything, except text? Maybe vector images make sense too, but they are rare on the web.
After like 2 hours of trying to use full zoom on FF 3 I went and reverted to default zoom - never looked back.
@CodingHorror Learning how to deal with all types of text zooming is very very important when working on web applications. If you design a front end to a system that connects to someone else’s data then you have no way of knowing in advance what that content is and how it will break your layout. The same is true of designing multi-lingual web applications, as anyone who has had to deal with German text will attest to.
So, while under normal circumstances the whole page zooming might be a nice feature, without some mechanism for doing text only zooming it becomes more difficult for developers to test their layouts and make design decisions accordingly.
We recently built a new system for my mother with her first large LCD monitor. We immediately ran into the problem of text readability at the monitor’s native resolution. So we bumped up the display’s DPI. This increased the text size in many applications, but not all of them. Some applications ignore the DPI setting so we had to tweak them in various ways. Then of course there are all those web sites. Some sites include their own text scaling options, so we were fine with those. Most simply display text at whatever size they damn well feel like, leaving the user no option but to zoom the whole page. Initially we had her set up to do this in IE7 and it worked reasonably well. But as soon as you zoom a page more than a notch or two, you have to start using the horizontal scrollbar to see anything on the right side of the page. And of course all the navigation and graphics and advertisements also get pointlessly huge. Then I discovered that Firefox 3 had the ability to zoom only text. We quickly switched her to FF3 and it’s been smooth sailing ever since. Please don’t encourage developers to give up on text-only zoom. People NEED it! PS This is the first time I have ever disagreed with you. So smarten up (grin).
Full page zoom is all good fine as long as the browser is not forced to add scrollbars - this is when all hell breaks loose and the entire website usability drops to very low levels. I’m usually looking for the useful content on web pages, which means the text is what I care most about, not the background chrome. The best way I’ve found to do this is on sites that provide Print version of their pages - the layouts are a lot simpler and there’s not extra garbage.
All in all I’d say that the two types of browser zoom are different tradeoffs between page fidelity usability and they both come short in the other departament than the one they were designed for.
But hey, Jeff, it’s only 2009, we’ve had these zoom types for the past 10 (text) 5 (full page) years at least, I’d say it’s time for some new, different tradeoffs to appear.
What about a browser that would understand the layout of your website and allow me to concentrate on just the center column that contains your blogpost, something like Deep Zoom for web pages and instead of zooming into an image, it zooms into a logical part of the page (btw, I’ve patented this already, haha). I know, some people won’t like this because it will decrese their ad revenues, but I’m immune to web ads anyway.
Would you like this better than full page zoom? I know it would be hard to do but hey, engineers need new challenges and I don’t think what we have now is the best we could come up with.
Sigh. I still hold to the belief that HTML pages should be readable on ANYTHING, far beyond the +1/-1 text size rule. Specify the content, and let the browser fit it to the screen/text size/etc. But that battle is now completely lost.
That’s all very nice, fine and dandy. But there’s one catch: What is the default font size?? The default size the browser ships with?
Designers will have to prepare their pages for font size zooming becaue people are likely to change the default font size in their browsers. When that breaks your page you can hardly blame the user.
Early IEs’ browser text size +/- didn’t apply if the text size was set using PX units. That’s why em was a better practice. In fact, many designers went through the trouble of using em as the unit for layout elements as well(img, divs etc). This way, the page is truly elastic. It’s less of a problem now that most modern browsers support better page zoom.
Using em is still a good idea for elastic web applications. This lets you change a single default font size ON THE SERVER and change the whole site to scale accordingly. This can also be a user preference setting so that they don’t have to use the zoom feature just for your site.
Browser zoom really isn’t very practical. You have to keep changing it back on a per site basis. What ould be more practical would be per site zoom where I could set a preference for a specific site to be zoomed to 1.5 but go back to 1.0 for other sites.
Sidebar:
Jeff, your posts lately seem to be pissing people off. This is good and bad – you get lots of comments and people returning to re-read, which is good for your stats and all, but at some point you’re going to need to re-group and re-focus, or people will quit coming.
I also love this comment Full page zoom is horribly broken in IE7. . Yeah right. So you blog about this great new feature that everyone should check out in FF3. Then you find out that it has been available for a couple of years in IE so you justify the mistake by saying that it was horribly broken in IE.
Come on, give credit where credit is due. It isn’t horribly broken. I’ve used it on many sites with no problems. Perhaps it is your usage model that is horribly broken…
Looks like lots of people have disagreed with this post. I do too, but I’m delighted to have seen it since it showed me how I could stop FF3 frm doing this ridiculous thing. I now have it doing text-only zoom and I’m much happier.
Sorry - I don’t see the point in this blog (this particular topic). What’s next: Links - they take you to another web page, but right click and you have more options like opening in a new tab or new window. Telling us about the most basic functions of our browsers is probably not going to be useful to people who know how to use their browsers…
Seriously, the articles here are normally well through out, sometimes controvertial and sometimes just what I’m up to sort of stuff. That’s all great, but this isn’t. How about another logic problem - Try to connect three houses to three utility sources (GAS, Electricity and water), none of which can cross. He he he…
Opera was the first browser to introduce full page zoom as an alternative to traditional font sizing
I wish more browsers would take the lead from Firefox 3
Stop pimping your busted-ass copy-cat browser.
Sincerly,
A Pissed Off Opera User you just insulted and demands an apology.
@Ben Wilhelm Mac users have had this feature for years. It’s called control + scroll. This magnifies the area of virtual desktop that the cursor is in to the entire screen. It’s light years ahead of Microsoft’s retarded Magnifier.