1145093 - "Default zoom" feature (settings UI for "layout.css.devPixelsPerPx")

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(Firefox for Android Graveyard :: Settings and Preferences, enhancement)

Description

[Stephen Friedrich]

Attachment: View of german it news site with default settings

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Ubuntu; Linux x86_64; rv:36.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/36.0
Build ID: 20150306140254

Steps to reproduce:

I upgraded from a Galaxy Note 2 to the Note Edge and found that the new stock browser version was unusable for me.

After searching the interwebs for hours I finally discovered a hidden feature that made me switch to firefox for good ;-)


Actual results:

The stock browser on the Note 2 had a very useful setting called "Default zoom", which effectively changed the reported viewport size by modifying the ratio of device pixels to css pixels.
That settings was _extremely_ useful, because it allowed me to make effective use of my phablet with its larger screen.
(Instead of just showing as little content as on a 4 inch screen, but just larger).

That option was gone in the newer stock browser and no other browser offered a similar feature.
Luckily "snorp" on the Firefox Mobile IRC told me to try to change "layout.css.devPixelsPerPx" in "about:config".
Hooray! I seriously considered returning my new mobile, because having 2560x1440pixels seems useless to me if I get to see only half the content than on my older mobile with a quarter of the pixels.

See the screenshots for some typical sites that are much more usable with devPixelsPerPx set to 2.5 (which means viewport size of 576x1024px).



Expected results:

I propose to make "layout.css.devPixelsPerPx" configurable via the settings UI.
That should probably be similar to the way the old stock browser versions let the user configure it:
Offer three options for "Default zoom" called "Far", "Medium", and "Close.

Also, it might be a good idea to have another default value for the viewport size for phablets.
(I think a good and still safe default would be to have anything with a display over 5 inches use 480px wide viewports instead of 360px.)

Comment 1

[Stephen Friedrich]

Attachment: View of german it news site with changed settings.

Comment 2

[Stephen Friedrich]

Attachment: old-stock-browser-settings.png

Comment 3

[Stephen Friedrich]

Attachment: View of popular german news site with default settings

Comment 4

[Stephen Friedrich]

Attachment: View of popular german news site with changed settings

Comment 5

[Kevin Brosnan [Ex-Mozilla]]

I doubt we have any plans to expose this setting in the primary UI.

Comment 6

[BMO Automation]

We have completed our launch of our new Firefox on Android. The development of the new versions use GitHub for issue tracking. If the bug report still reproduces in a current version of [Firefox on Android nightly](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.mozilla.fenix) an issue can be reported at the [Fenix GitHub project](https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/fenix/). If you want to discuss your report please use [Mozilla's chat](https://wiki.mozilla.org/Matrix#Connect_to_Matrix) server https://chat.mozilla.org and join the [#fenix](https://chat.mozilla.org/#/room/#fenix:mozilla.org) channel.