Magnifying Glass for Google Chrome™

FREE! The magnifying glass displays the zoomed area on the web page, making the selected area visible in detail.

Magnifying Glass for Google Chrome™ — What's New A magnifier should do one thing perfectly: make the small thing big, right where you are looking, without rearranging the page around you. This release is a rebuild of the extension from the inside out. The interface is new, a long list of defects is gone, and the whole thing now speaks your language. ONE CLICK TO START Clicking the toolbar icon now opens a compact panel instead of dropping you into a settings form. There is a single Start magnifier button, plus quick sliders for magnification, lens size and shape, so the adjustments you actually make day to day are one click away. A gear takes you through to the full settings when you want them. The settings page has been rebuilt as a single card with a working live preview. A real lens sits over a sample newspaper page, driven by exactly the same maths as the magnifier itself, so magnification, lens size, shape, smoothing and colour filters are genuinely previewed rather than described. Change a slider and you see the result immediately. Nothing needs saving; settings apply live. THREE WAYS TO MAGNIFY Snapshot mode captures the page once and magnifies that image, re-capturing when you finish scrolling. It is fast and quiet, and it is the right default for reading. Live mode re-captures on a timer, so video, animation and anything else that moves keeps moving inside the lens. Text mode (beta) magnifies the page's own text rather than a screenshot, so letters stay perfectly sharp at any magnification instead of turning into enlarged pixels. Canvas and video content does not appear in this mode yet. BUILT FOR LOW VISION Colour filters apply inside the lens only, leaving the rest of the page untouched: invert, greyscale, high contrast, and yellow-on-black for maximum legibility. There are also protanopia, deuteranopia and tritanopia simulations for checking how your own work reads to colour-blind users. Everything is reachable from the keyboard. Arrow keys move the lens, plus and minus adjust magnification, square brackets resize it, and the number keys 1 to 5 jump to magnification presets you choose. The lens carries proper accessibility roles and announces itself to screen readers. TOOLS INSIDE THE LENS Press F to freeze the lens in place so you can read without holding the mouse steady. Press P for a colour picker with a hex readout you can click to copy. Press M to measure pixel distances. Press C to copy the magnified region to the clipboard, or S to save it as a PNG. Press H at any time for the full shortcut list. The scroll wheel is yours to assign: change magnification, resize the lens, scroll the page, or close the magnifier. Ctrl or Alt with the wheel always scrolls the page regardless. The magnifier can also remember magnification and lens size separately for each website you visit, stored on your device only. WHAT WE FIXED The most serious defect is gone: the magnifier could trap you on a page. With "close only with Esc" enabled, if keyboard focus was stolen, Esc stopped working while every other exit had already been disabled, leaving a full-screen overlay swallowing your input. Esc now closes the magnifier in every mode, unconditionally. Compatibility Mode never actually worked, on any version. It relied on browser APIs that Manifest V3 removed and on a page that was not in the package. It has been rebuilt and works. The Alt+Z keyboard shortcut was dead, because the manifest declared a Manifest V2 command name that Chrome silently ignored. It works now, and the panel shows your real shortcut rather than assuming the default. Pages where Chrome blocks extensions used to fail silently — you clicked and nothing whatsoever happened. You now get a clear explanation and a route to Compatibility Mode. The lens used to show a stale image, and the page could scroll underneath a frozen overlay. It now hides while the page moves and re-captures when it settles. Display scaling is detected automatically rather than typed in by hand, and a long-standing bug that mis-centred the lens on high-DPI screens has been corrected. Under the hood, jQuery 3.2.1 — carrying three published vulnerabilities — was being injected into every page you activated on. It and Bootstrap are gone. The magnifier is now dependency-free, 247 KB lighter, and no longer re-injects itself on every activation. Settings that were silently corrupted by being saved as text instead of numbers are migrated automatically, invalid values are clamped rather than stored, and Reset no longer wipes unrelated extensions' saved data. NOW IN 40 LANGUAGES Previously most of the interface fell back to English outside the default locale. Every string is now professionally translated into all 40 supported languages. PRIVACY Screenshots are processed on your device and stay there. The magnifier never uploads what it captures.