Mozilla Firefox 3.1 Moves to Beta 4, Disable Site Specific Zoom in Firefox 3.0

Article by George Norman (Cybersecurity Editor)

on 27 Feb 2009

The Mozilla Foundation has recently come out to announce that it will shortly release Firefox 3.1 Beta 3; the development process will then move on to Beta 4. While we wait for Mozilla to wrap up the development of Firefox 3.1 you can zoom in on other things, such as how to actually perform this task in Firefox 3.0 and how to get the browser to un-remember site specific zoom settings.

Vice President of Engineering with Mozilla, Mike Shaver commented on the Firefox 3.1 issues: “We're going to wrap up Beta 3 in the next week. A fourth beta will follow approximately six weeks after, as a vehicle for more testing of [the] TraceMonkey [JavaScript engine], video, Places and other eagerly-awaited improvements, as well as feedback from Beta 3.” The whole delay issue is caused by problems with Firefox 3.1’s JavaScript engine, TraceMonkey.

This is not the first time that bugs and blockers cause the development team at the Mozilla Foundation to push back Firefox 3.1 releases. After Beta 2, Firefox 3.1 was supposed to move to Release Candidate, but instead it was decided it would go to Beta 3. When Firefox 3.1 Beta 3 was supposed to come out, there were still some kinks to be ironed out so Beta was delayed.

Moving on, here is how you can zoom in while using Firefox 3.0:
- Ctrl and + to zoom in and Ctrl and – to zoom out
- Ctrl and Scroll up to zoom in and Ctrl and Scroll down to zoom out
- Reset the zoom level by pressing Ctrl and 0. The old school method would be to go to View -> Zoom -> Reset.

As you can see, the shortcuts for performing zoom related tasks are quite simple to remember. There are other keyboard shortcuts that you can employ while using the Mozilla developed browser (detailed article here); there is also a simple tweak you could use and speed up the Firefox browser.

The thing is that Firefox 3.0 remembers these zoom settings on a per page basis, and at times this might prove to be annoying. Follow this simple step by step guide if you would like to disable this feature:
- In the address bar type in “about:config”
- Locate “browser.zoom.siteSpecific”
- Double click and change the setting from “True” to “False”
Now you will no longer have to remember everything, including the zoom level of a certain web page because the Mozilla Firefox browser will automatically reset the zoom level.

In related news, if you would like to zoom in on whatever is displayed on your screen, check out Magic Glass and Dragnifier.


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