308467 - expand webpages to fit browser window

Status: NEW

(SeaMonkey :: UI Design, enhancement)

Description

[Robert T. Drury]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux ppc; en-US; rv:1.4) Gecko/20031013
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux ppc; en-US; rv:1.4) Gecko/20031013

A huge number of news and commentary websites fix their webpage widths to
something around 600 to 700 pixels.  Often the news article text is confined to
a width of 1/4 ot 1/3 of my screen, and sometimes goes down ten to twenty pages
with white blank filling most of the screen.  The text is usually put into a
table cell with several columns on either side.  I want Mozilla to select that
table cell containing the article and expand it out to the full width of the
browser window.  You could have a menu popup "view table cell in new window".
  

Reproducible: Always

Comment 1

[Robert T. Drury]

here's an extreme example:

http://turb.seas.ucla.edu/~jkim/sciam/turbulence.html

Comment 2

[Andrius Narbutas]

U can use custom CSS applied to those pages, or something like RIP
http://rip.mozdev.org/ 
So, all of these features are already implemented...

Comment 3

[Felix Miata]

http://turb.seas.ucla.edu/~jkim/sciam/turbulence.html is extreme, but not really
a good example. It uses the deprecated design method called presentational
markup, with tables for layout. Newer sites make their narrowness using CSS. For
this particular URL, I was able to cause it to fill my viewport width by
including the following in my profile's chrome directory in the file
userContent.css and then restarting Mozilla:

     body>table {width: 100% !important;}

Much newer versions of Mozilla (and SeaMonkey and Firefox) provide the ability
to disable author CSS from the view menu, which typically allows the content to
fill your viewport.

This bug should be invalid due to being filed against a non-current Mozilla
version, but I'm leaving it open for possible duping. Compare also to bug 4821

Comment 4

[Tony Mechelynck [:tonymec]]

Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9pre) Gecko/2008040801 SeaMonkey/2.0a1pre

In this browser running maximized on my 1024x768 LCD screen, the page in comment #1 fills less than half the width, leaving the rest blank. This is obviously due to bad programming (the authour ought to have specified width=100% for the top-level table, a fixed width in ch or ex (not in pixels) for the sidebar, and left the main column fill the rest), but it is nevertheless annoying.

There is no UI to widen the main column to the full width of the page (e.g. by right-clicking), and if I want to override it, I will have to use the @-moz-document directive (which is Mozilla-proprietary, and therefore not documented in paper tutorials about CSS) and add coding for every such badly-coded page in my userContent.css, which may make it quite bulky quite fast. AFAIK there is no UI to change the display width temporarily for the page currently being viewed, other than by hacking at the page through the DOM Inspector.

Confirming this bug on the trunk.