I'm having a strange issue in Firefox. My new computer (surface book) has a touchscreen and I really like the feature of zooming in by making the "pinch" gesture on the screen. In Chrome and Edge, this works how I'd expect it to. It "zooms" in. If I zoom in via the zoom buttons it makes all the text bigger in the traditional scrolling style. This is, however, not the case in Firefox. Firefox adjusts the browser's "zoom level" (which is really scaling, not zooming, in my option) and is not the result I want.
The question:
Is there any way to get Firefox to actually zoom in with a touchscreen pinch gesture instead of just magnifying?
Best Answer
Update
Native support has landed in 83.0.
It now works well with history navigation, placement of context menus and web content like Wikipedia article previews.
What's not done yet?
I don't know if this also works for touchscreens, but this finally works natively for me on a Macbook Air touchpad. No more need for CSS wizardry from extensions (I also used Multi-touch Zoom up until now, so thanks to the author).
Set
apz.allow_zooming
totrue
on theabout:config
page in Firefox Nightly 71.0a1.I don't know for how long this option has been available, but I found it just now by following the trail from 688990 and ending up applying the steps to reproduce (STR) in 1556556.
Scroll behavior is not perfect while zoomed in, but I think it's still worth it in order to reduce the layout problems that could result from using the extension on some webpages (e.g. Reddit). Zoom out, reposition the cursor and zoom in again is an acceptable workaround until the feature lands.
The responsiveness is also hugely improved compared to the extension. There is no more delay between the pinch and the zoom, and it's now also possible to initiate a pinch while the page is scrolling, which saves time from first having to stop the inertial scrolling -- something that was always necessary with the extension.
Update I should add that I didn't quite understand the difference between "zooming", "magnifying" and "scaling" in your question (to me they're all pretty much synonymous), or what you meant by "traditional scrolling style". I'm just assuming that I'm answering your question based on the fact that the Multi-touch Zoom extension solved your problem.