Setting a Default Zoom Level for Chrome Browser

Update (2018-5-28): I don’t know why, but apparently people are still coming to this page after all these years, so here is the most up-to-date info: in recent Chromium/Chrome, simply click on the vertical ellipsis ‘⋮’ icon to the right of the address bar, and in the opened popup menu, select ‘Settings‘; in the ‘Apperance‘ segment of the opened Settings page, locate ‘Page zoom‘ option and change it to the desired value. There are only a series of preset values available for selection and you can’t input custom value, but the presets should be more than enough. You will notice that the popup menu opened by the ‘⋮’ icon also contain a ‘zoom’ option. This is for per-site zoom level setting, while the one mentioned above is for overall zoom level setting. Per-site zoom level can also be easily changed using Ctrl + Mouse Scroll Up/Down while browsing, and the browser will remember the setting across sessions.

Update (2012-5-19): On Chromium/Chrome 19, open ‘Settings‘, click ‘show advanced settings‘ at the bottom, scroll to ‘Web content‘, change ‘Page zoom‘.

Update (2011-3-9): Google has released into the stable release channel Chromium/Chrome 10, which supports the global default zoom level setting mentioned in the earlier update below. Those on Windows should already be using this new release and those on major linux distros won’t have to wait for too long, hopefully.

Update (2011-1-20): Although not available in the current stable release channels (8.0.552.* series) yet, recent versions of Chromium/Chrome 9 and 10 (available from https://sites.google.com/a/chromium.org/dev/getting-involved/dev-channel) include support for user-selectable global default zoom level, which can be accessed at ‘Settings – Under the Hood – Web Content – Page Zoom’. The zoom level choices are the same as those available in the ‘Zoom’ menu entry and apparently not customizable.

Big LCDs with their high resolutions are now dominating the desktop display market. Unfortunately, internet content has yet to catch up with this not-so-new development. Although it has become rarer and rarer to see statements like ‘Best viewed at 800×600′, a significant part, if not a great majority, of web content has simply not been designed to display on anything with a resolution higher than 1024×768. Surfers often find themselves unconsciously leaning towards the screen to make out the small fonts. White spaces left by websites in their visitors’ browser windows have become so common, that online advertising companies have even come up with special types of ads that are specifically designed to fill this emptiness.

Fortunately, most, if not all, modern browsers boast the capability of both text zooming and full-page zooming. The one with the best solution, indisputably, is Firefox with its NoSquint add-on, which provides both default and site-specific zooming. IE8 allows the user to set one zoom level that is applied to all sites and anything other than that has to be set manually. The situation of Chrome (and Chromium) is a bit awkward at the moment. On the one hand, it memorizes user-set zoom levels for all sites visited, so that on subsequent visits, the site’s content will be automatically zoomed. On the other hand, there does not seem to be an option to set a default zoom level for all sites, which both Firefox, through NoSquint, and IE8 provide. What all this comes to is that every time I visit a new website in Chrome, I have to manually zoom it to fit my 1920×1080 display. That is at least two ctrl-+ or ctrl-wheelup for EVERY new site I visit. And should I have to re-install OS and lose all configuration from previous Chrome install, I will have to do it for EVERY site, AGAIN. I feel exhausted already just describing the process.

That’s enough ranting for now.

Like Firefox, Chrome also allows people to create ‘extensions’ to the browser and not surprisingly, people similarly annoyed by the situation have come up with quite a few attempted solutions, which are readily available from Google’s Chrome extension gallery.

But there is also an easier way, much easier IMHO. Since earlier this year, Chrome has incorporated support for user-defined custom stylesheets. What this means is that Chrome user is able to restyle the look and feel of every website he or she visits [1]. This also provides a direct solution to the ‘default zoom level’ issue.

Chrome loads user-defined stylesheets from the ‘User StyleSheets’ folder. In Linux, this folder is usually located in ‘~/.config/google-chrome/Default’. In Windows, this folder is in ‘%USERPROFILE%\Local Settings\Application Data\Google\Chrome\User Data\Default’ for XP and ‘%USERPROFILE%\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\User Data\Default’ for Vista and above. Chromium has slightly different folder names [2]. There should be an empty Custom.css file in the ‘User StyleSheets’ folder. Just add the following lines to the Custom.css file and save.

body
{
  zoom: 1.5;
}

Styles defined in Custom.css will be applied to all websites visited. The above lines will automatically zoom every website to a pre-defined level of 150% (=1.5). In cases where 150% is not ideal and manual zooming is used, Chrome’s built-in zoom-memory will kick in and on subsequent visits, zoom the content to the manually set level instead of the pre-defined 150%.

In short, four lines of code, along with Chrome’s built-in features, pretty much achieves the basic functions of NoSquint on Firefox: default zoom level plus site-specific zoom level.

[1] http://userstyles.org/

[2] http://www.chromium.org/user-experience/user-data-directory