Page zoom now blurs Google Maps! Solution?

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semigeek
Posts: 322
Joined: April 16th, 2014, 8:54 pm
Location: Colorado

Page zoom now blurs Google Maps! Solution?

Post by semigeek »

Google search has large text, so I've had zoom set to 90% for a long time. But lately I've noticed Google Maps looking blurry, and figured out why. My page zoom is now being applied to Maps as well, which degrades its resolution! Now I keep having to readjust zoom each time I use one rather than the other, since they're both on "google.com".

Zoom is meant to distinguish between text and images, and until recently there was no problem here. Is anyone else seeing this, what's going on, and is there a solution?
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dickvl
Posts: 54146
Joined: July 18th, 2005, 3:25 am

Re: Page zoom now blurs Google Maps! Solution?

Post by dickvl »

The maps on Google maps are WebGL content.
There is a zoom text only feature, but that can cause issues with text overlapping on websites that position their content absolutely.

Do you otherwise have to zoom out pages ?

You can possibly adjust the global zoom via layout.css.devPixelsPerPx on the about:config page.
The default is '-1' to use the OS DPI setting and you can use '1.0' to override this.
layout.css.devPixelsPerPx accepts adjustments in 0.1 (10% => 0.9/1.1) and 0.05 (5% => 0.95/1.05) changes.
semigeek
Posts: 322
Joined: April 16th, 2014, 8:54 pm
Location: Colorado

Re: Page zoom now blurs Google Maps! Solution?

Post by semigeek »

Thanks for suggesting View:Zoom:TextOnly... while it solves this problem on Google, it ruins the view of some other sites so it won't work for me. (I mostly use zooming out to fix the stupid C E L L - P H O N E - L O O K of websites today.)

Neither layout.css.devPixelsPerPx nor toolkit.zoomManager.zoomValues is any help. Some values look better than others on a given map screen, but that can all change when its own zoom level does.

This is a relatively new issue, but I suppose it could date back to the url change from maps.google.com to google.com/maps and I didn't immediately notice. Previously FF recognized Maps as a different domain (as it still does translate.google, etc) so there was no zoom level set. I don't recall how long ago Google did that... and can't imagine why.[*]

[ * - Edit: I read a plausible suggestion, that this surreptitiously allows Search to access the location provided to Maps. But this happened 3 years ago, and I know I haven't been seeing blurry maps for so long. Something must have changed recently on Maps.]
Last edited by semigeek on December 7th, 2021, 10:21 pm, edited 2 times in total.
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xanthon
Posts: 405
Joined: December 17th, 2005, 11:55 pm

Re: Page zoom now blurs Google Maps! Solution?

Post by xanthon »

There is an add-on which enables you to set text only zoom on a particular site.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefo ... m-page-we/
semigeek
Posts: 322
Joined: April 16th, 2014, 8:54 pm
Location: Colorado

Re: Page zoom now blurs Google Maps! Solution?

Post by semigeek »

... Actually, it turns out there's only one site I visit regularly and have zoom set on that gives trouble with text-only zoom, and I've just done some css hacks in userContent to fix it. So TOZ may be the answer after all, at least for now.

Thanks for mentioning Zoom Page though. I run only two add-ons and don't like to add more, especially complicated ones I only need one feature of, but may resort to that if I have further trouble.

Is it possible with a bit of Javascript to just toggle TOZ (the pref is browser.zoom.full) when loading google.com? That would be the ideal solution.
semigeek
Posts: 322
Joined: April 16th, 2014, 8:54 pm
Location: Colorado

Re: Page zoom now blurs Google Maps! Solution?

Post by semigeek »

Addendum: The really strange thing about this is that with FF in full zoom mode on Google, I can see the Maps page load perfectly sharp initially, and then a second later it just blurs and stays that way, with no other change in framing etc. What could cause such behavior?
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