431322 - Text/font size zoom affecting other tabs/windows to same website

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 419612

(Firefox :: General, defect)

Description

[Alex North-Keys]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9b5) Gecko/2008032619 Firefox/3.0b5
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9b5) Gecko/2008032619 Firefox/3.0b5

Using text fontsize zoom with either control +/- or control-mousewheel now unexpectedly causes all tabs and windows to the same website to scale together.  The URI is considered equivalent based (apparently) solely on the hostname part of the URI, ignoring the protocol (http versus https) and the path of the webpage within the site.  Character encoding was checked as well, since it was first seen on UTF-8 pages, but was shown to be irrelevant. 

For example, consider two tabs or windows displaying different webpages within http://slashdot.com - changing font size in one affects both imemdiately.  However, if one of the pages is in http://apple.slashdot.com, the effect is not seen.

It is unlikely, especially for large websites, that all webpages will be using the same stylesheets and font sizes.  Consider these two:

 https://www.talisman.org/~erlkonig/
 http://www.talisman.org/~ratso/

Looking at these shows two webpages that obviously are not using the same design, are in fact written and maintained by different individuals.  It's plainly silly to force font size zooming to affect both pages.

One could argue that it does make sense for two views of the same page, but I disagree.  Different sections of the same page might be more easily viewed in different sizes, especially if different character sets, such as english vs japanese, are in use.  For example, enlarging the japanese for easier readability can make the english annoyingly large in the example below, and a user should be able to address that with two, font-size independent views of the page:

   http://www.talisman.org/~erlkonig/japanese/

The font-size zoom linking between views appears to be a new addition, and I recommend its removal.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1.  Bring up one webpage in two windows or tabs, or two different webpages from the size website (as appears in the host spot in the URIs).
2.  Use control-"-" /control-"+" or control-mousewheel to zoom one page.
3.  Lo, the other has changed size as well.

Actual Results:  
Both views change font size.

Expected Results:  
Only the view in which text zooming was requested should change font size.

Comment 1

[John P Baker]

-> Duplicate of bug 419612

Comment 2

[Daniel Veditz [:dveditz]]

This is true (and as far as I know, by design) for the new Firefox 3, but is not a Firefox 2 bug.

Comment 3

[Alex North-Keys]

Can be disabled with browser.zoom.siteSpecific - but disabled should be the default, I'm thinking.  Many people will think the shared-zoom behavior is a bug, especially when they visit different users' webpages hosted on the same site and need to scale them differently - and can't.