My Latest Experiment
I’ve switched browsers yet again, this time to the Chrome Beta on the Mac. The thing I really like about it: a very usable full-screen view. With a dual-monitor setup, I can use one display just for browsing, and remove all the needless UI elements. If I need the monitor for something, I simply use Spaces to clear it off the screen and pull up another window.
This means that I have a 1600x900 browser window, however, and that’s a bit much for efficient use. So, I decided to do a little experiment: I’ve bumped up the zoom from 100% to 125% in Chrome.
It’s not really necessary - I have no problem reading text at a normal size - but doing this adds detail to vector elements on each site, such as the text and lines and shapes. This has tradeoffs, though: images are blurry, and I’ve noticed navigation issues with some sites like Amazon.com when zoomed in.
The goal of the experiment is to find out if those advantages are worth the tradeoffs, given a good-sized screen. I’m gonna try it out for a few weeks and report back on what I’ve learned. Here’s a few discoveries, however:
Daring Fireball is one of the few sites I’ve seen where the images are high-res by default - in this case, the logo image is at least twice as big as it is rendered at 100% zoom. There is no noticeable degradation apart from the sidebar ad image.
Tumblr seems to work pretty well - though there are a lot more images, I suspect that many elements use CSS border-radius for rounded corners, and most of the site looks quite good at higher zoom settings.
On sites such as the New York Times that have a ton of small links piled on each other, a higher zoom setting makes them more comfortable to use and read.
Google Chrome requires an extension to maintain zooming - there’s no option in Chrome to set a standard zoom. This is still better than Safari, though, where there’s no full-screen option at all without editing its .plist file.
Ars Technica has its footer embedded in an iframe in its HTML, which in Chrome cancels out the zoom and leaves the page with an awkward structure. If I see this bug more often, it’ll probably be enough to convince me to bring the zoom back down. This is the most serious issue I’ve seen unless photo clarity is a deal-breaker for you.
That’s what I’ve found out so far, and I’m liking it. What do you guys think? Got any questions about zoomed browsing for me?
