Am I Imagining Things or Has It Finally Catched Up?

(Migrated weblog post from LSR)

I mean, FireFox. Just by one of those knowledge accidents you bump into every now and then (in this case a weblog post from one of my work colleagues) I just find out that FireFox seems to have a zoom feature available. Well, it is not using that name for the feature itself but it would have the same effect, or pretty close. Indeed, if you load a web site with FF and you find out that the font size is far too small for you to read anything on it, you could just use the keyboard shortcut Ctrl + ‘+’ (the plus sign) or Ctrl + ‘-’ (minus sign) and it will increase / decrease the font size which will give that zoom effect.

I must say that it is not as clean and smooth as you would expect, specially if you have tried Opera’s zoom effect, but still it would provide you with the desired results, which is basically see larger font sizes. One thing though where it may not be surpassing Opera is the fact that as you zoom in / out in a web site the information displayed would still be a lot clearer in Opera than in FF, and this is probably where there seems to be plenty of room for improvement.

However, for some basic functionality it would do the trick. With Opera though, it is state of the art and certainly what some other web browsers have been trying to innovate for quite some time now and have failed, to date, to come up with such a good feature as that one in Opera.

Nevertheless, it is still a handy keyboard shortcut to know about although I am still not sure why it has not been added into the FireFox Keyboard Shortcuts web site yet. Maybe they are waiting for the next marketing wave saying they have invented and incorporated zooming in a web broser. Who knows.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 18th, 2005 at 1:02 pm and is filed under Productivity Tools, Knowledge Accidents, Knowledge Snippets. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.