Limit Zooming to Current Tab Only in Mozilla Firefox

You can zoom any web page in Mozilla Firefox in many different ways. You can choose View → Zoom from the toolbar and zoom-in or zoom-out, you can use the hotkeys Ctrl + or Ctrl – for zooming in and zooming out respectively, you can press the Ctrl key and scroll the mouse wheel up or down or you can click on the hamburger icon and choose the zoom level from there. By default Firefox applies the zoom levels selected by the user to the site open in the current tab – so the zoom level works web site wide. If the same web site is open in other tabs, the same zoom level is automatically applied without any further effort.

Firefox Zooming Settings

Usually this is what most people desire, because if they need to adjust the zoom level on one page of a website, it can be safely assumed that  other pages of the same website would also need the same zoom level. But some people may not really need this approach when browsing the internet in Firefox. They would want the zoom level to be applied not site-wide but only to the current tab. Fortunately, Firefox allows you to easily switch from site-wide zooming to current tab only zooming. Here is how you can switch the zoom settings :

  1. Type about:config in the Firefox address bar and press Enter.
  2. You will see a warning about voiding of the warranty. Proceed by clicking on the button labeled I’ll be careful, I promise.Firefox Tracking Protection for Privacy Mode
  3. In the search box, type zoom to narrow down the settings we want to change.
  4. Double-click on setting browser.zoom.siteSpecific and change its value to false. This is the setting that controls the zoom scope of Firefox.Firefox Zooming Settings
  5. Close the settings tab and now you can try out zooming and you would notice that it no longer works across a web site but works only in the tab where you change the zoom level.

As you can see, it is fairly easy to switch from the site-wide zooming setting to the current tab only zooming. This way you can personalize Firefox and choose to browse the web as you like it.