1127441 - turn off font inflation

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Firefox for Android Graveyard :: Toolbar, defect)

Description

[Brad Lassey [:blassey] (use needinfo?)]

The web has improved drastically since we implemented font inflation. It is starting to feel like on balance font inflation does more harm than good.

What do we need to make a call one way or the other?

Comment 1

[Kevin Brosnan [Ex-Mozilla]]

See also the open bugs that mention font inflation. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/buglist.cgi?quicksearch=OPEN%20%22font%20inflation%22

Comment 2

[Aaron Train [:aaronmt]]

Similar tree of currently open blocking font-inflation largely unassigned unmonitored bugs https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/showdependencytree.cgi?id=627842&hide_resolved=1

Comment 3

[Mark Finkle (:mfinkle) (use needinfo?)]

Kevin mentioned that we should just set the pref to "no inflation" and watch telemetry (I think we have a probe) to see if people turn it back on.

Comment 4

[Mark Finkle (:mfinkle) (use needinfo?)]

Plan is to set the default to "no inflation" on Fx38, but let the Settings UI in place. We'll watch for feedback and telemetry.

Comment 5

[Kevin Brosnan [Ex-Mozilla]]

Attachment: 1127441-disable-inflation.patch

Try is closed will push when open.

Comment 6

[Mark Finkle (:mfinkle) (use needinfo?)]

Comment on attachment 8563507 [details] [diff] [review]
1127441-disable-inflation.patch

LGTM

Comment 7

[Kevin Brosnan [Ex-Mozilla]]

https://treeherder.mozilla.org/#/jobs?repo=try&revision=eaa8d0820952

Comment 8

[Michael Comella (:mcomella) [NI reported issues only: ex-Mozilla]]

:)

Comment 9

[Kevin Brosnan [Ex-Mozilla]]

Try looks reasonably happy. When do we want to land this? 39 cycle starts in 10 days.

Comment 10

[Karen Rudnitski [:kar]]

I'm not pushing it into a release one way or another. If 39 makes sense from a train perspective, fab. Let's see it ride the most sane train!

Comment 11

[Michael Comella (:mcomella) [NI reported issues only: ex-Mozilla]]

39 is here, let's land it!

Comment 12

[Kevin Brosnan [Ex-Mozilla]]

Only have try access. Setting check in needed.

Comment 13

[Ryan VanderMeulen [:RyanVM]]

https://hg.mozilla.org/integration/fx-team/rev/6e58c5de2d47

Comment 14

[Wes Kocher (:KWierso) (Not reading bugmail; email directly if needed)]

https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/rev/6e58c5de2d47

Comment 15

[MaximYanchenko]

What about websites with small fonts? (pinch-zoom doesn't help as the lines of text become longer than the screen)
What about websites where Reading mode doesn't work (or works incorrectly, picking up wrong text or only part of the text)?
What about users with bad eyesight?

I'm not sure what "harm" is meant above, but there is definitely a massive "good".
Please reconsider.
We need this feature and we need it to work correctly (see bug 1151321, bug 755770).

Comment 16

[Chenxia Liu [:liuche]]

It looks like the usage of this pref has changed from 2.44% (38) to 4.26% (39) as of today. That

Comment 17

[Chenxia Liu [:liuche]]

It looks like the usage of this pref has changed from 2.44% (38) to 4.26% (39) as of today. That isn't much, unless we think that users just can't find this pref.

Comment 18

[Nick Fitzgerald [:fitzgen] [⏰PST; UTC-8]]

FWIW, I thought we had rendering bugs with reddit and hacker news ever since this made its way to Fennec Beta. The text on those sites is almost unreadable without bumping up the default text size. Arguably these are bugs in those sites, but it used to work fine, leading me to naively blame us before I encountered this bug.

(In reply to Chenxia Liu [:liuche] from comment #17)
> It looks like the usage of this pref has changed from 2.44% (38) to 4.26%
> (39) as of today. That isn't much, unless we think that users just can't
> find this pref.

I had no idea that this was a pref until you showed me.

Comment 19

[Chenxia Liu [:liuche]]

Anthony, do you think a contextual hint on the n-th double tap to zoom would be appropriate, or would it be too much? Something like a supertoast that would pop the user into the settings for Text Size.

Comment 20

[Chenxia Liu [:liuche]]

Also, we should update the strings for the text sizes in settings - currently, the default that we ship with is "Tiny" which definitely isn't the right string because it implies that Firefox is making text smaller than normal/default.

Comment 21

[Anthony Lam (:antlam) Find me, @antlam on Slack!]

I don't think this should have a contextual hint based on number of taps right now. 

I think the utility of this feature isn't that obvious (even to me).

Chenxia, any idea why we moved to "tiny" (as Nick points out in comment 18)? Between Brad's point originally and the fact that pinching to zoom has become so normal and easy to use, I'm tempted to suggest we remove this setting,

Comment 22

[Chenxia Liu [:liuche]]

Okay, we can remove this setting. However, for the use case that I saw with fitzgen's phone, pinch-to-zoom doesn't solve the problem - you can pinch and zoom, but it doesn't reflow the text to your visible screen size, so you're going to have to scroll left and right to read to the end of the line.

I have seen this too, and I'll just use the reader mode icon to handle it - but for things like reddit comment threads, that's not a good option.

I'll file a bug for updating the string or removing the pref altogether.

Comment 23

[MaximYanchenko]

Please fix it, don't turn off. It's a necessary feature.

Comment 24

[David Baron :dbaron: (⌚️UTC-5, no longer working on Mozilla)]

Was this partially undone by bug 1328868?

Comment 25

[Jan Henning [:JanH]]

Depends on what you mean by undone? It was only turned off by default, but could still be reenabled from the settings menu, and the new option isn't much different there - it's still turned off by default.

Comment 27

[lilydjwg]

font inflation seems to be on for nightly again?

Without font inflation I zoom in and move around, with font inflation I zoom in and out while moving around a lot (e.g. the crash report page). I don't find a way to disable it.

Comment 28

[Botond Ballo [:botond] [away until Oct 19]]

(In reply to lilydjwg from comment #27)

font inflation seems to be on for nightly again?

Without font inflation I zoom in and move around, with font inflation I zoom in and out while moving around a lot (e.g. the crash report page). I don't find a way to disable it.

Probably best to file a new bug for this.

Comment 29

[Jan Henning [:JanH]]

Turning off automatic font size adjustment (or whatever it's exactly called in English) under accessibility settings should do the trick.

Comment 30

[Kevin Brosnan [Ex-Mozilla]]

This was added back by default in https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/fenix/issues/1286. Opening a bug here is not the right place. You can open an issue on GitHub.

Comment 31

[lilydjwg]

Thanks! That setting works for me, and thanks for the right place for bug reports for Android nightly.

Comment 32

[kuro68k]

What is the process for getting this re-evaluated? A lot of sites I visit are broken but work fine in Chrome with font inflation.

Comment 33

[Botond Ballo [:botond] [away until Oct 19]]

(In reply to kuro68k from comment #32)

What is the process for getting this re-evaluated? A lot of sites I visit are broken but work fine in Chrome with font inflation.

I would suggest filing an issue here with some example sites and screenshots.

Comment 34

[Jan Henning [:JanH]]

Just for completeness, font inflation actually is turned on by default in Fenix these days, and the follow-up to comment 32 is bug 1685756.