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Google brings smooth Safari-like zoom to Chrome Canary for Mac

The latest build of Chrome Canary for Mac packs a great new feature that’s likely familiar to those who use Safari on a daily basis. While current stable builds of Chrome have a jaggedy pinch-to-zoom functionality that only zooms in 10% increments, the latest build of Chrome Canary provides a smooth buttery zoom experience like Apple’s browser.

As of right now, it looks like the feature works a little bit less fluidly than Apple’s offering, but that’s to expected in the most experimental public release version of Chrome. Zooming works the same way that it does in Safari and current versions of Chrome, so all it takes is pinching two fingers on the Trackpad.

If you’re sticking with Safari on your Mac for this reason or others (battery life, anyone?), it looks like this feature—once it makes its way to the stable release—will give you one more reason to switch over to Google’s browser. If you want to give it a try, head over and download the latest build of Chrome Canary.

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Comments

  1. puri517 - 10 years ago

    Everybody stealing everything from Apple.
    If u have a Mac – use Safari, that has amazing tech inside and save your battery, and works just fine. Chrome for poor Windows users.

    • Too bad it doesn’t show favicons.

      • puri517 - 10 years ago

        Favicon is definitely the most important part of the web browsing. Come on?! With many so different in style favicons tabbar looks ugly.

      • kalafalas (@kalafalas) - 10 years ago

        look up safaristand, it fixes everything

    • Jurgis Ŝalna - 10 years ago

      I’m sorry, but this feature was the one that was preventing me switching. Really excited to switch to Chrome, been using it for work forever.
      Safari is very nice browser, but it leaks memory and is significantly less stable. Chrome has somewhat better tab management too. And better track record in security.
      Only one more thing I’d like is something what I’ve seen in Firefox – hierarchical tabs.

    • Quit being condescending. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with Chrome. It’s an extremely powerful browser and the add ons are second to none. There’s absolutely no reason to be insulting or spout out fanboy nonsense.

    • Moostly (@moostlydesign) - 10 years ago

      As a developer, I will just flat out say you are wrong. The user data for web browsers proves it. Just no. Sh.

  2. Gazoo Bee - 10 years ago

    What about the two finger “double-tap to zoom” (to the width of the page element)?

    I use that all day every day. I don’t know anyone who bothers to “pinch” to zoom on a page. It’s awkward and slow even in Safari.

  3. Avenged110 - 10 years ago

    It only took them what? 4 years?

  4. Andy Brooks - 10 years ago

    I like chrome because its a little bit faster than Safari but the scrolling and zooming is still chunky and choppy, even in the Canary version and the UI is ugly and bookmarks look like crap. Ill keep using Safari.

  5. Jurgis Ŝalna - 10 years ago

    Having tab expose would be nice. I’m starting to get used to it in Safari.

  6. what really bugs be with chrome for mac is that OSX native text substitution does not work under chrome. Google really needs to fix this its a deal breaker.

  7. Aaron McConville (@foo25) - 10 years ago

    Has anyone got any ideas on how I could possibly disable this and revert to incremental zoom?

  8. Julia Truchsess - 9 years ago

    I totally love the new finger-pinch zoom on html pages, but for some reason, finger-pinch zoom no longer works on PDF pages. Really annoying, as PDF zooming has worked for ages.

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Avatar for Stephen Hall Stephen Hall

Stephen is Growth Director at 9to5. If you want to get in touch, follow me on Twitter. Or, email at stephen (at) 9to5mac (dot) com, or an encrypted email at hallstephenj (at) protonmail (dot) com.


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