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Zooming with touchpad or touchscreen not smooth compared to IE or Edge / Pinch to zoom works only in one direction

  • 2 replies
  • 2 have this problem
  • 11 views
  • Last reply by user1250566

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1. I'd like to ask if there are any concrete plans to improve zooming in Firefox which is not smooth at all. In my opinion, zooming with a touchscreen or touchpad should work like it does on Firefox for Android. The different behaviour between mobile and desktop versions of browsers seems to be described quite well on this website (http://www.marauderzstuff.com/PermaLink,guid,01e53220-a0e6-4464-9e6e-fd7289550d83.aspx/). But since this was written in 2010 there might have been some improvements going on. While testing touchscreen and touchpad zooming on other browsers I noticed that IE and Edge offer a very smooth zooming experience. Chrome does quite well while zooming with the touchscreen but zooming with the touchpad or mouse wheel works just like it does in Firefox.

I've read on another webpage (http://www.ghacks.net/2015/07/28/scrolling-in-firefox-to-get-a-lot-better-thanks-to-apz/) that scrolling is going to be improved in future versions of Firefox due to APZ if E10s are enabled. I tested this in the latest nightly version to see if this adds the expected zooming behaviour to the desktop version of Firefox but personally I couldn't tell much of a difference in zooming with the touchpad or touchscreen. Firefox continues to use fixed zooming steps although I enabled the correspondent settings (i.e. layers.async-pan-zoom.enabled; true).

2. There's a second problem I face with the touchpad on my laptop. Although I'm able to use the pinch to zoom gesture to zoom out the gesture doesn't seem to work the other way around. In other programs and browsers pinch to zoom works fine in both directions. With the touchscreen on the same device the pinch to zoom gesture in Firefox works just as expected. As far as I can tell, the following entries in about:config seem to be correct and I couldn't find any other solution to this problem elsewhere (I already tried reinstalling etc.):

browser.gesture.pinch.out; cmd_fullZoomEnlarge browser.gesture.pinch.in; cmd_fullZoomReduce

I'm using a Windows 10 machine although both problems were present on Windows 8.1 as well. I hope this is the right place for these kind of questions otherwise feel free to point me to other Mozilla sites.

1. I'd like to ask if there are any concrete plans to improve zooming in Firefox which is not smooth at all. In my opinion, zooming with a touchscreen or touchpad should work like it does on Firefox for Android. The different behaviour between mobile and desktop versions of browsers seems to be described quite well on this website (http://www.marauderzstuff.com/PermaLink,guid,01e53220-a0e6-4464-9e6e-fd7289550d83.aspx/). But since this was written in 2010 there might have been some improvements going on. While testing touchscreen and touchpad zooming on other browsers I noticed that IE and Edge offer a very smooth zooming experience. Chrome does quite well while zooming with the touchscreen but zooming with the touchpad or mouse wheel works just like it does in Firefox. I've read on another webpage (http://www.ghacks.net/2015/07/28/scrolling-in-firefox-to-get-a-lot-better-thanks-to-apz/) that scrolling is going to be improved in future versions of Firefox due to APZ if E10s are enabled. I tested this in the latest nightly version to see if this adds the expected zooming behaviour to the desktop version of Firefox but personally I couldn't tell much of a difference in zooming with the touchpad or touchscreen. Firefox continues to use fixed zooming steps although I enabled the correspondent settings (i.e. layers.async-pan-zoom.enabled; true). 2. There's a second problem I face with the touchpad on my laptop. Although I'm able to use the pinch to zoom gesture to zoom out the gesture doesn't seem to work the other way around. In other programs and browsers pinch to zoom works fine in both directions. With the touchscreen on the same device the pinch to zoom gesture in Firefox works just as expected. As far as I can tell, the following entries in about:config seem to be correct and I couldn't find any other solution to this problem elsewhere (I already tried reinstalling etc.): browser.gesture.pinch.out; cmd_fullZoomEnlarge browser.gesture.pinch.in; cmd_fullZoomReduce I'm using a Windows 10 machine although both problems were present on Windows 8.1 as well. I hope this is the right place for these kind of questions otherwise feel free to point me to other Mozilla sites.

Modified by user1250566

All Replies (2)

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Type about:preferences#advanced<Enter> in the address bar.

Under Advanced, Select General. Look for and turn off Use Hardware Acceleration. Restart the browser. Is this better?

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Thanks for the reply. I've already tried this but it doesn't improve anything. I don't think there is a simple fix for the zooming behaviour in Firefox. It's more that I'd like to know if there are any concrete plans to improve this "issue". Other browsers have already managed to offer a much smoother experience with laptops in this aspect of browsing the web.

This setting also doesn't help with the pinch to zoom issue.