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Comment by whoopdedo | Hacker News Reader

I miss the way the original Opera handled scaling which was to resize the entire draw surface after rendering. So everything, including pictures, kept the same relative sizes and there was no reflow or jumping around. That meant you had to horizontal scroll but so what?

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This is the worst possible type of zoom. It's like zooming into a PDF or PNG image. You can't read like that, constantly scrolling left and right.

This is the problem though, unfortunately. People aren't even talking about the same thing. Users need to increase their font size so they can read comfortably. But so many people seem to think "zoom" should do what you describe (like zooming in to see small details?). I suppose the best is that web browsers offer both modes. But unfortunately text zoom requires some understanding from the web developer to work (or just a simple web site; a little knowledge is a dangerous thing). So we get stuck with stupid zoom because half the web breaks if you dare to change front size.

Opera also had a mode where it reflowed individual div's to fit the screen, without reflowing the entire page. I remember looking for an alternative browser with this feature back when, but never finding one

Actually it did reflow the entire page. In particular, it inserted line breaks where ever text was being laid out, without ever messing with the width of divs or other elements. It then made a seamless jump with the viewport to keep the point of interest where you expect it to be on the screen. That's years ago when the Chromium version came out, however. I don't know how or if it works today, or how it was implemented in Presto before then.

The version with per div reflowing might have been before android. My Sony P1i ran symbian I think, can't remember actually. It was way before reactive webpages were a thing. And it worked really well for making most desktop pages usable on my phone. I also missed the scroll wheel and the rocker keyboard for the longest time

You can do this on Firefox if (and only if I think) you have a multi-touch input device. So on my trackpad (a Wacom tablet) or my touchscreen laptop I can pinch to pan and zoom like this. But I don't think there is a way to trigger this with a keyboard and mouse.

I don't think I prefer it most of the time, as scrolling is annoying. But it is super useful for sites that break the browser-default scrolling.

In Firefox, you can configure the mouse to scale-zoom. In `about:config`, change `mousewheel.with_control.action` to 5 (default is 3 if you want it back). Holding Ctrl and scrolling will zoom in on the cursor location like a touchscreen pinch.

Credit: https://superuser.com/questions/1659519/firefox-pinch-zoom-w...

Pinch zoom on Firefox (Linux, desktop) does that for me.

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