First off, congrats to Firefox for a smashingly successful launch of Firefox 3. Almost 30 million downloads worldwide (as displayed on the cool map on SpreadFirefox.com which itself is good overview of a savy web audience worldwide).
Apart from just being “better” and looking cool (mmm…brushed steel…) there are a few fundamental changes to how Firefox works, particularly to the Developer in me. The way that input fields and buttons have been changed so they are now in line with Safari (for all you Mac users. I’m not sure about PC’s…anyone?)
I also just stumbled on another “small” change that has some rather impactful results! I’ve been resizing text with “Apple +” or “Apple -” now for a while (Substitute Ctl for Apple on PC’s me thinks) and code websites accordingly. As developers, we can also size in em’s so that vertical heights are also scaled with text to maintain rhythm. Heights in em’s and width’s in px’s; fairly standard.
But all of this suddenly changed with FF3. Resizing text suddenly resized everything. Not only all CSS measurements, but also images. Images become pixelated but text continues to be sharp (as opposed to the Apple + two finger scroll). All of this courtesy of a preference available under the View > Zoom menu. Check/Uncheck “Zoom Text Only” to toggle back and forth. Neat eh? Can’t decide whether I’ll stick to the new way of resizing or go back to the old.
Posted by Steve Mynett
