Changing the browser zoom level

Try if this works for you. This works on FF, IE8+ and chrome. The else part applies for non-firefox browsers. Though this gives you a zoom effect, it does not actually modify the zoom value at browser level.

    var currFFZoom = 1;
    var currIEZoom = 100;

    $('#plusBtn').on('click',function(){
        if ($.browser.mozilla){
            var step = 0.02;
            currFFZoom += step; 
            $('body').css('MozTransform','scale(' + currFFZoom + ')');
        } else {
            var step = 2;
            currIEZoom += step;
            $('body').css('zoom', ' ' + currIEZoom + '%');
        }
    });

    $('#minusBtn').on('click',function(){
        if ($.browser.mozilla){
            var step = 0.02;
            currFFZoom -= step;                 
            $('body').css('MozTransform','scale(' + currFFZoom + ')');

        } else {
            var step = 2;
            currIEZoom -= step;
            $('body').css('zoom', ' ' + currIEZoom + '%');
        }
    });

I would say not possible in most browsers, at least not without some additional plugins. And in any case I would try to avoid relying on the browser's zoom as the implementations vary (some browsers only zoom the fonts, others zoom the images, too etc). Unless you don't care much about user experience.

If you need a more reliable zoom, then consider zooming the page fonts and images with JavaScript and CSS, or possibly on the server side. The image and layout scaling issues could be addressed this way. Of course, this requires a bit more work.

Possible in IE and chrome although it does not work in firefox:

<script>
   function toggleZoomScreen() {
       document.body.style.zoom = "80%";
   } 
</script>

<img src="example.jpg" alt="example" onclick="toggleZoomScreen()">