Firefox 3 features I - Full zoom

In my previous post I talked about how even though many reviews rated Firefox 2 above Internet Explorer 7 (based largely on anti-Microsoft sentiment), I believed Internet Explorer 7 did a better job. One of the factors considered was IE7's page zoom feature.

The newly released Firefox 3 comes with a similar full zoom feature which by large has replaced the old font resize feature. This is a move in the right direction and an apparent acknowledgement of the value of the feature. Being able to resize the entire page means web pages can be scaled up without messing up layout or fiddling with the monitor's resolution. This is clearly essentially because for alot of LCD monitors, only max resolution is viable.

But I still think the folks at Mozilla haven't got it right. Full zoom in Firefox 3 is a per site feature, meaning it will remember which site to zoom, while default zoom level remains 100%. Even though on Windows, Firefox correctly (and nicely) honors system level font size, this invariable default zoom is not enough as an accessibility feature. Luckily I found an add-on called No Squint that solves this problem. No Squint lets you set the default zoom level of web pages. It works.