by Ryan Budiman

Created on: March 14, 2009

Changing the text size is one of the most common thing people do when they surf the Internet. People who has vision limitation will be happy to read large text, while some web administrators or power users prefer to view their web pages as a whole, without having to scroll down.

With Firefox, everyones' favorite web browser, customizing the font size is a breeze. Note, however, there are several methods to do this, which could potentially confuse illiterate computer users and people who are new to Firefox. So without any further ado, let's look at the techniques to change the font size to our needs.

1. -Using the keyboard-

This method is probably the method people used most frequently. Press and hold the Control [CTRL] key and hit + to enlarge the font size. To decrease the font size, press Control followed with a - (that is a minus sign, as most people can easily be confused). If somehow you managed to screw up your browser, press Control and 0 (zero) to reset the zooming level.

2. -Using the mouse-

First note that not all mouse supports this feature. To use this technique, you need a mouse with the scroll (the third button, as some people say). Again, as with the keyboard methods, hold down the Control key while scrolling up or down. Scrolling up will increase the text size while scrolling down will make the text smaller. Sadly though, you can't reset the zoom level using a mouse. Maybe the Mozila Firefox developer team can add this feature in later releases.

3. -Using the Menu-

The Firefox toolbar holds the View menu. This menu, as the name implies, holds the commands to alter how you view a web page. To change the zoom level via this menu, click view and select the Zoom submenu. A menu will pop out and as you can see for yourself, you can increase, decrease, and reset the font size according to your needs. The neat thing about this menu is the 'Zoom Text Only' command; when this is ON any zoom level you change will only change the text, not anything else like the pictures or the forms. This will also applies if you modify the text using keyboard or mouse after you activated this setting.

That's about all you can do to modify the text size in Firefox. Although there are some extensions that you can use to do so, but this will not be covered in this article because extensions could differ from one Firefox to another. But the methods described above is a standard in all Firefox.

Learn more about this author, Ryan Budiman.
Click here to send this author comments or questions.