User:Broccauley/The Firefox Zoom Neglect
FF has always had inferior zoom control and zoom status indication to competitors like Internet Explorer or Opera. It has never had a zoom control on the status bar, but instead has always hid it away in the menu somewhere, making it tedious to zoom in or out for users who haven't memorized the keyboard short-cuts. It's also tedious for users who have memorized the keyboard short-cuts - this is because a good zoom control (in most office/image viewing software) is also a status indicator of the current zoom level as well as just a control - this is something that, disappointingly, has never been present in Firefox.
How do the Mozilla designers zoom pages when they browse the web without a dedicated control?:
- Do you use the Ctrl keys?
- Will new users know to use the control keys?
- Do you constantly guess the current zoom level/have such a good memory
that you can remember what the current zoom level is?
- Do you by extreme luck never come across badly designed web-sites with the text too small/too large?
- Have you never used a screen where the DPI is far too high? This is especially important as screen resolutions are getting higher and higher.
- Do none of you ever chill-out on a sofa/couch with a laptop slightly further away from you than if you were at a desk and hence want to change the zoom setting?
- Do you never get sore eyes after looking at a screen for a long time, and never
give your eyes a bit more of a rest by increasing the text size?
- Do you all have 20/20 vision and are none of you even the slightest bit short-sighted ? Of those of you that are short-sighted do you sometimes never want to gives your eyes a rest by not using your glasses/contact lenses? Do you neverever forget your glasses/contact lenses?
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myopia#Epidemiology In the US approximately 25% of people have some form of myopia; in China (world's most populated country and largest potential FF market) approximately 80% of all people have some form of myopia]. The need for a functional and well-exposed zoom control is therefore far from a rare corner case -- it's an absolute necessity.
Another argument for better zooming has nothing to do with bad eyesight and
the distance of the user's eye from the monitor, and more to do with the
next-generation web. With ever increasing occurrence I'm coming across SVG vector images (on Wikipedia in particular) where you can't actually see the content without using the browser's built-in zoom controls. For example, take a look at the following SVG images:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9e/Arctic.svg
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/74/Timeline_of_web_browsers.svg
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/df/US_Court_of_Appeals_and_District_Court_map.svg
With the market leader (IE) about to support
SVG/canvas properly in its next iteration, I can only see this type of
SVG/canvas scenario becoming more and more common.
I also remember seeing a presentation a while ago by your very own Aza Raskin while speaking at Google. He was talking about the power of a simple zoom interface and how interfaces such as calendars, satellite maps etc. could be made much simpler by exploiting the power of zoom gestures. One point that Aza made was that he found a paper map of Chicago much easier to use than the maps provided online by the Chicago public transport company. He then showed how a simpler interface could be made with simple zooming. One later comment from a member of the Google audience, however, was that such interfaces were not simple to implement using existing standard HTML/JS methods. My point here is that a very simple zoom interface for the "Chicago map" scenario could be trivial to implement by using a standard SVG/canvas element along with the browser's in-built zoom controls!!