Firefox: zoom changes page position
Jeff
the same in all Mozilla browsers that include a zoom feature.
Particularly in the middle of long pages, and especially with those that
contain mostly text, changing either zoom setting (full or text) changes
the relative vertical position of the page-- that is to say, the
vertical portion of the page displayed in the browser window changes
when the zoom setting is changed. With particularly long pages (book
length, or even the length of a short story), a zoom setting change of
only 5% will displace the vertical position of the page by several
windows worth (even with Mozilla running full screen). Compare this
behavior to that of Adobe Acrobat, which maintains the same page and
relative vertical position on it when the zoom setting is changed.
(Acrobat can be made to capture a web page as one [or sometimes several]
long continuous page[s]. When displaying such PDF files, Acrobat is
still able to maintain the relative page position when the zoom setting
is changed.)
This behavior in Mozilla reduces the value of the zoom feature (although
I suppose the situation could be worse-- I just discovered that IE 7
repositions to the top of the page when the zoom is changed). It also
reduces the value of 'Dog Ears'
(https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4482
http://yellow5.us/firefox/dogears/),
a Firefox extension that allows the user to place index marks on pages
and then seek back to them later (which provides a "bookmark" for
specific content on long pages). Since 'Dog Ears' stores the absolute
vertical position of index marks (probably distance from the top of the
page), their positions relative to the page content changes if the zoom
setting is changed. Many users asked the author about this problem in a
forum (which I cannot seem to find, now), and he replied that the only
other solution was to associate the index marks with content, which
seemed unreliable.
My wish for the wish list, then: When a Mozilla browser is displaying
somewhere in the middle of a web page, whatever is being displayed at
the vertical center of the window will still be displayed there when the
zoom setting is changed. Hopefully, whatever mechanism is developed to
achieve that can also be made accessible to add-on authors, so that
extensions like 'Dog Ears' are still useful when the zoom setting is
changed.
That will probably be some work, and I wish I could contribute some
code, but my experience is limited to writing shell scripts, and simple
command line utilities in C. I hope I can persuade Mozilla developers to
take it up, as the zoom feature is not really fully functional without it.
Thanks for listening,
Jeff
Pascal Sartoretti
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=64926
You may vote for it; but crossing fingers might help too, as this issue
was created 8 years ago. I am annoyed too.
Jeff
> This is a know issue :
>
> https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=64926
>
> You may vote for it; but crossing fingers might help too, as this issue
> was created 8 years ago. I am annoyed too.
Thank you very much for this link. Had I filed a bug report as I was
planning to do, it would have become duplicate #22. I cast my vote, read
the discussion, and added a couple of comments.
"Good luck" is right! Crossing fingers sounds like a plan; perhaps a
rain dance or related ceremony might also help. Apparently, the problem
is complicated by other scrolling-related issues that have yet to be
resolved-- someone needs to decide how to handle those before any code
can even be written.
Jeff
> This is a know issue :
>
> https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=64926
I found this very interesting article cited in the discussion of a
related bug, that was cited in the discussion of this bug:
http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2009/05/18/making-the-web-bigger-part-1-improvements-to-zoom.aspx
I haven't tried IE8 yet; if the M$ development team managed to solve the
problem in anything near the style they claim, they have at least as
much bragging right as they show in their article.