User:Broccauley/The Firefox Zoom Neglect
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:
The zoom control/status found in modern versions of MS Office and Windows Live Photo Gallery is well designed:
It meets all the criteria and the mid-point of the slider in the Office version snaps to 100%.
Another good design is that of the "Glazoom" add-on:
(Unfortunately this add-on does not always get maintained quickly to work with the newest Firefox releases - this is also such a basic feature that it should be built-in by default!).
Therefore I think the best type of design is that in modern versions of Office - fully functional and with a modern style. This would map to the Firefox status bar as follows:
The zoom percentage indicator also has a drop-down allowing you to access the zoom options (text only etc.), just like Glazoom.
