Firefox's 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 competitor browsers and 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.

The importance of a good zoom control and zoom status indicator today

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?

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.

Zoom & The Future of the Web

Another argument for better zooming has nothing to do with bad eyesight or the distance of the user's eye from the monitor, and more to do with the next-generation web. Browsers are becoming the universal portal to viewing remote documents and images. Why therefore does the browser not have as good pan & zoom controls as offline image viewers and editors? 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 simple zooming (about 35 minutes into video). 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 calendar or map scenario could be trivial to implement by using a standard SVG/canvas element along with the browser's in-built zoom controls!!

Not only Zooming - Panning with the space bar?!

To navigate quickly around a document/image it is also useful to be able to pan as well as zoom. Why therefore does the browser not have as good pan & zoom controls as offline image viewers and editors?

The space bar performs a rather useless function in Firefox - it does exactly the same as the down arrow! The spacebar performs a pan function in image/docement viewers/editors such as Photoshop, Adobe Reader, GIMP, Windows Photo Viewer etc. Why can't we make the spacebar pan in Firefox as it does in other image viewers? IMO the GIMP implementation is the best because it does not require a click of the mouse button.

Designing a zoom control - nowhere is as good as the Status Bar

A good zoom control should have the following characteristics:

Status indication of the current zoom level, especially explicitly as a percentage;
The ability to see this indication at the glance of an eye;
The ability to quickly incrementally adjust the zoom level;
The ability to jump to a much larger/smaller zoom level;
The ability to easilty reset the zoom to its default state.

As things stand in Firefox 3, Firefox 3's zoom interface is the worst of any browser and fails on all points except for point 5. This failure is mainly due to the zoom control being buried in a menu.

The Opera and Internet Explorer implementations are almost identical to each other and are superior to Firefox, but both fail on point 3:

The implementation in Chrome (right), whilst being better than the FF3 implementation in actually displaying the current zoom level, is still a major fail, being inferior to both Internet Explorer or Opera implementations because it is hidden in a menu. It also has no easy way to reset or jump quickly to a much larger zoom level.

The Apple Safari zoom control is the same menu-buried affair as in Firefox 3 and is equally as terrible. The Apple implementations in Finder and iPhoto have a nice slider but fail on point 1, 3 and 5 (specially 1 - not displaying current zoom percentages: