How in the Tech

Switching between Firefox preset window sizes quickly

By Adam Myers ⋅ April 20, 2010 ⋅ Tags: Firefox

If you are a web designer you probably are familiar with the necessity to visualize your layout across multiple browsers and screen resolutions. A proper design will render correctly across every browser, regardless of the level of standards the rendering engine aligns with. Likewise, an elegant design scales well across the common desktop resolutions. The most popular browser window size is around 1024×768 – or a resolution that no one would consider high-res anymore. Therefor it’s critical for the design to be able to adjust his browser window to something near those dimensions.

One such solution for this problem exists as an extension for Firefox. ResizeIt allows the user to quickly switch between pre-defined and custom window sizes at the flick of a keyboard shortcut. ResizeIt can be configured for up to four different resolutions, including full screen, and also capturing your existing browser window size if you don’t wish to define the typical 4:3 or 16:10 ratio resolutions.

Once configured, the keyboard shortcuts ALT+[1,2,3,4] will adjust the Firefox browser window to the defined sizes without restarting the entire browser session. This is quite handy for testing your design, making adjustments, and then re-visualizing the results.

Even if you are not a web designer by trade ResizeIt can still prove useful. How many times have you come across a site with Javascript that forcefully resizes your window to fit whatever content they are providing? With ResizeIt you can capture and record your current window size, bind it to one of the keyboard shortcuts, and quickly flick back when you visit those offending websites.

Download ResizeIt