Friday, August 27, 2010

Best Viewed at 125%?

Roughly a couple weeks ago, I decided to do an experiment: full-screen browsing at 125% zoom. After 12 days, here’s my thoughts.

The upsides:

  • Cleaner and sharper text that I can read from farther away from the screen.
  • It’s easy to concentrate on the browser window when there’s nothing else to look at.

The downsides:

  • Images are blurry and less sharp.
  • Javascript bugs can occasionally render a page useless.

And the ugly downsides that shouldn’t be happening:

  • Safari has no fullscreen mode, though you can add one with Glims.
  • Chrome’s fullscreen mode does not let you change the default zoom (you need an extension to handle that), and on pages like Facebook the tab-bar may not slide down like it is supposed to. (I am, however, running the Chrome 6 Beta.)

I did list twice as many downsides as upsides, but as I type this in the browser at 125% I love how the text looks. The Tumblr logo only looks slightly goofy at this zoom level. When I fall back to 100%, everything seems too tiny for me, although I know I was fine with it until the experiment. Now? I find myself growing to like the increased zoom level.

I’m going to try Glims with Safari next, and see how that works out. It would be nice to have a trouble-free full-screen experience, even if it takes a little initial setup. But overall, I’m calling this experiment a success.

I would recommend that my readers try this out. The experience is decidedly not trouble-free, but those willing to take the plunge may find that they love browsing this way.

UPDATE: I’ve just run Safari with Glims, and it’s missing these key features in fullscreen mode:

  • The tab bar and other nearby bars do not autohide on full screen mode. The OSX menu bar does, but when you’re using Safari on the secondary monitor on a dual-monitor setup this only causes more problems.
  • Safari is just like Chrome when it comes to setting a permanent zoom. Unfortunately, I don’t think Safari extensions have been around long enough to have an autozoom fix available. You can change the default font in Safari preferences, but text-zoom and browser zoom do not work identically, unless things have changed since the IE6 days when text-zoom was the only zoom available.

So, I’m pretty sure that Google Chrome remains the best full screen browsing experience on the Mac. Too bad it isn’t wonderful out of the box.