What’s New
A running log of Ultra Zoom releases. The TL;DR for power users coming from another hover-zoom tool: feature parity is here, and the basics that used to require Pro are now free.
Full-image hover & in-page QR decoding Latest
The September wave is about the first second of a hover: what you see, where it lands, and whether the page lets you have it at all.
You see the whole picture again
- Full image is the default preview. Pan-and-zoom used to be the default, so a hover opened on a 2.5× crop — which reads as a blurry, broken preview unless you knew to go looking for the mode. Seeing the whole photo without opening the post is the reason people install a hover-zoom extension, so that is what a hover does now. Scrolling still zooms deeper once the image is up.
- Your setting is safe. A one-shot migration moves existing installs off the old default, keyed so a later update can never re-apply it over a choice you made deliberately — and it skips anyone already using Lens mode.
- Region zoom centres on the cursor. Scroll-zooming into a detail now keeps the point under the pointer fixed instead of drifting toward the middle, and the zoom-out floor is a true 1× view of the whole image.
- No more jitter restarts. Sub-pixel mouse movement no longer tears down and rebuilds the overlay.
old.reddit works properly
- Listing thumbnails cap at 70px, so nearly every landscape crop fell under the minimum-size gate and could never trigger a hover at all. They are now exempt.
- Every post type resolves to its original image — galleries, self posts with an inline image, crossposts, and external article links, not just bare
i.redd.itlinks. Ultra Zoom reads the post’s own JSON, which old.reddit serves same-origin, so it needs no host permission and no extra round trip. Arrow keys walk a full gallery straight from a listing row.
QR codes decode in the page
- Pressing Q used to hand the image URL to zxing.org’s hosted decoder, which has since been retired — so every press opened a page that errored out. Ultra Zoom now decodes the code itself, in the page. The image is never uploaded anywhere.
Fixes
- Shadow-DOM sites. The zoom backdrop stopped stealing hover from content inside a shadow root, and Ultra Zoom no longer zooms “through” that content to a background image behind it.
- Firefox Enhance stability. AI Enhance no longer freezes the tab or crashes Firefox’s GPU process.
- Custom rules apply live. Editing a custom rule or sieve now propagates to tabs you already have open, instead of waiting for a reload.
- Every Pro gate is clickable and says what it costs, and the running version is shown in the popup and on every settings tab.
Reliability pass
An unglamorous release: the edges of features that already worked, sharpened until they stopped surprising people.
- Batch download names files correctly. Extensions are derived from the real image type rather than guessed from the URL, so a zip no longer arrives full of mislabelled files.
- EXIF parser bounds. A malformed or truncated tag block no longer takes the panel down with it.
- Enhance memory guard. A WebGL out-of-memory check catches oversized images before they can take the tab with them.
- Pro unlocks instantly. A licence change is broadcast to every open tab, so the tabs you already had open turn Pro the moment you pay — no reload.
- Checkout retries on a flaky connection instead of dead-ending, and plugin failures degrade to generic hover-zoom rather than breaking the page.
Free Enhance & favorites
Enhance stopped being a Pro-only button. The free tier got the good classical upscaler; Pro kept the neural one.
- Lanczos enhancement is free. Every install can sharpen and upscale a low-resolution image on hover. Pro adds neural 4× super-resolution (Real-ESRGAN), which reconstructs detail rather than interpolating it.
- Favorites organization — group and manage the images you save instead of one flat list.
- Theater mode centres correctly when you zoom into an off-centre image.
- Transforms survive re-show. Pan, rotation, and flip are preserved when an overlay is hidden and brought back.
- Popup tier badge no longer flashes “Free” while the service worker is waking up.
Listing overlays & free-tier expansion
The late-April wave focused on two things: making Ultra Zoom genuinely useful for real-estate workflows, and removing paywalls from review surfaces that should never have had them.
Listing-aware overlays for real estate
- Redfin, Zillow, Realtor.com, Crexi — the hover overlay now renders a structured caption with the listing’s status (NEW / OPEN / SOLD), price, address, and beds / baths / sqft line.
- Full gallery on Redfin — arrow-key navigation now resolves every photo in a listing, not just the thumbnails rendered in the page DOM. Walk a 40-photo listing without leaving the search-results view.
- Shift+L opens the underlying listing page from the overlay; A copies the address to the clipboard.
- K toggles the listing-detail caption strip on demand without changing the global setting.
- Theater-mode fix — scroll-zoom past the original image bounds no longer clips when theater mode is active.
Free for everyone (with a small Ultra Zoom watermark)
- Region copy (Shift+C) — crop and copy any sub-region of the zoomed image; free exports carry an attribution watermark.
- Batch download (Shift+D) — pull up to five images per session as a zip, each watermarked, with a README pointing back to Ultra Zoom.
- EXIF panel (I) — camera, lens, ISO, shutter, and GPS for any image that carries the metadata.
- Color-palette tool (P) — click a swatch to copy hex to clipboard.
- Windowed gallery filmstrip — eight thumbnails centered on the active photo, plus a +N Pro tile that opens the full strip after upgrade.
Pro removes the watermark and the cap
- Region copy and batch download export without the Ultra Zoom watermark, with no per-session image cap.
- EXIF panel adds Copy as JSON and Export GPX.
- Color palette adds Copy CSS (
:root { --color-N }) and Export PNG. - Filmstrip shows every gallery thumb, not a windowed view.
Quality-of-life
- [ / ] cycle overlay size presets (small → medium → large → fullscreen) and persist the choice.
- + / − nudge the active overlay 5% without writing to settings.
- New Capture region setting decides whether Save dumps the full image or just the visible viewport.
- Logo-skip heuristic prevents the overlay from triggering on header / nav site logos.
- Imgur thumbnail-suffix bug fixed so 7-character IDs ending in s/m/t/b/l/h no longer 404.
AI upscaling release
Ultra Zoom enhances the photo as you zoom — not just enlarge it. The model runs entirely on your device, so no image leaves the browser.
New Pro feature
- On-device AI upscaling — Real-ESRGAN (general x4v3) reconstructs detail in low-resolution images at hover time, with Lanczos resampling as an automatic fallback when the model isn’t available. Useful for MLS thumbnails, compressed product photos, and any tiny preview that used to go pixelated when you zoomed in.
- Per-site toggle — turn AI upscaling on only where you need it; the popup remembers your choice per domain.
- Zero network calls. The model is bundled with the extension. Like everything else in Ultra Zoom, no image data is sent to a server.
Imagus-parity release
The big one: every staple of the legacy hover-zoom tools is now in Ultra Zoom, plus a dozen new site plugins and a power-user upgrade path.
Free for everyone
- Theater mode — press Z to expand any zoomed image to a full-window view.
- Reverse image search shortcuts — G / T / N / Y / Q / J kick off a search on Google, TinEye, Yandex, and other engines without leaving the page.
- Keyboard shortcut help overlay — press ? over any zoom to see every binding.
- Premium site plugins are now free — Instagram, Amazon, Pinterest, Reddit, eBay, and the rest of the catalogue ship for everyone.
- Basic gallery navigation — ← / → through any gallery while the overlay is open.
- Hover history — the last 50 images you hovered are saved locally so you can re-open one you scrolled past.
- Community URL rules pack — pull the latest sieve from the popup to unlock new sites without waiting for a release.
New Pro power features
- Video playback controls — M mutes, ↑/↓ tweak volume, ,/. step frames.
- Advanced gallery — filmstrip view, slideshow, and batch-download of every image in the active gallery.
- Hover history power-ups — capacity bumped to 1,000 entries with full-text search and CSV export.
- Custom & extended URL rules — teach Ultra Zoom about your private CDN or any site we don’t cover yet.
Twelve new site plugins
Out-of-the-box hover-zoom for Unsplash, Pexels, Wikimedia, Alamy, AP News, Getty, Bilibili, Weibo, 9GAG, AliExpress, Avito, and more — on top of the existing 60+ supported sites.
Coming from Imagus or Hover Zoom Plus?
Ultra Zoom now covers the workflows you relied on, with a privacy story those tools can’t match: zero telemetry, zero analytics, no server that sees your browsing. Read the architecture story.
Spot something missing or want a new site supported? Tell us — release notes for the next build are already in motion.