Setting a canvas's width or height properties has the effect of clearing the canvas. Even canvas.width = canvas.width
; will cause you to lose everything in the canvas. Sometimes this is desirable, but in your case it probably isn't.
What you will probably need to do is something like this
var myCanvas = document.getElementById('myCanvas');
var tempCanvas = document.createElement('canvas');
tempCanvas.width = myCanvas.width;
tempCanvas.height = myCanvas.height;
// save your canvas into temp canvas
tempCanvas.getContext('2d').drawImage(myCanvas, 0, 0);
// resize my canvas as needed, probably in response to mouse events
myCanvas.width = newWidth;
myCanvas.height = newHeight;
// draw temp canvas back into myCanvas, scaled as needed
myCanvas.getContext('2d').drawImage(tempCanvas, 0, 0, tempCanvas.width, tempCanvas.height, 0, 0, myCanvas.width, myCanvas.height);
In most browsers, the scaling will be done with a bicubic scaling algorithm, causing it to get blurry. In some cases you can set a CSS property to cause nearest neighbor on the canvas if you want, but browser support for this is very spotty right now. You can instead manually do a nearest neighbor scale , as this question shows: How to stretch images with no antialiasing
Alternative CSS Approach
Another approach is to scale the canvas using CSS. In Chrome/Safari/IE you can just do:
<canvas style="zoom:200%" />
In Firefox, you can use a scale transform to achieve the same effect:
<canvas style="-moz-transform:scale(2)" />
In many ways this approach is easier, but it comes with its own little gotchas and browser specific quirks.