1262150 - Printer paper size does not change along with printer selection.

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Toolkit :: Printing, defect)

Description

[Josh]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/49.0.2623.87 Safari/537.36 OPR/36.0.2130.46

Steps to reproduce:

45.0.1
Open Firefox. 
Go to print something...
Select the printer you want to print to (I used a zebra label printer or something unusual) and hit "OK"  As soon as you hit ok, this selected printer is saved in memory. 

Close Firefox.

When you exit FF, the last printer we printed to is saved into roaming profile FF data (Prefs.js) 

Open Firefox.
Print something again. 
Select a different printer, lets say something with a page size of 8.5x11
And print. 





Actual results:

The document you print the second time comes out on the right printer, but is using the paper size from the previously selected printer (the zebra in my case). So it comes out really small on the 8.5x11 paper.


Expected results:

When we selected the different printer, the page size should also be getting changed. But this doesn't happen.  Ways around this...

1. When the print dialog opens, click the "Properties" button, then click okay. This will save the correct size into memory and FF will then print correct. 

2. Close firefox after making your printer selection. The prefs.js will then get updated. When you re-open FF, it will be read again and the correct size will be set at that point. 

Basically what I believe should happen is when you select a different printer, the size setting should be read into memory and used.. and currently it appears to just be using whatever was last set in the prefs.js.

Comment 1

[Josh]

It's been months and nothing has been done with this?  Seriously?  How do we get this elevated?  This is a serious issue within our organization as it prevents our users from printing properly formatted documents from FF browser. Are FireFox developers even watching this?  I don't get it. This seems to have been lost in the vacuum.

Comment 2

[E]

I have been experiencing this problem for a long time and its incredibly aggravating. Windows 10 x64, latest Firefox version (though its an issue on many other computers I use including Win7). Similar situation as OP (Josh), I have 2 printers, a regular HP laserjet (8.5x11 paper) and a Zebra label printer (4x6 thermal paper). All other applications treat the printer settings properly, when I pick the printer from the print options, it uses all the settings specific for that printer. In Firefox, it doesn't. I can't tell what Firefox is actually doing under the hood, but it is always overriding my Zebra printer settings with non-4x6 paper size, and overriding the HP laser printer settings with non-8.5x11 paper size.

It *used* to at least be predictable: In previous versions of Firefox I discovered that if I brough up the print dialog box, picked a different printer and did 1 print job, it would try to use the settings from the previously-selected (or previously printed) printer. However if I did another print job, when i brought up the print dialog box the second time, it would have remembered the printer i just attempted a job with, and then print using its settings. so any time I wanted to switch printers with FF, I would have to print twice. Very annoying, but predictable.

More recently FF has been acting way more bizarre and more unpredictable. Maybe this is a Windows 10 issue as I started using Win10 recently, or maybe its an issue with the more recent versions of Firefox (from the last few months). Basically I learned that Firefox is not honoring the printer settings at all, its keeping its own registry of paper size and using the wrong ones. If I set both printers' paper size manually using for example "print.printer_<printer name>.print_paper_height", it might work for 1 job but then FF changes those entries to settings from the other printer, and I keep trying to reset it, and now neither of my printers will print correctly... I end up having to save all jobs as a PDF or image and printing with some other app (since all other apps obey the Windows printer settings).

PLEASE FIX THIS. PRINTING IS BROKEN IN FIREFOX. Thank you

Comment 4

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Do you still see this problem when using a current version?

Comment 5

[Josh]

It has been a while since I have tried. I have pushed all of my users away from Firefox for printing anything so I have not heard anything in a long time. I tested using version 87.0. I was not able to reproduce my issue. Are you aware of any work being done with printing in FF ?

Comment 6

[Phoenix]

Resolved per whiteboard and Comment 5
PS: there were some changes in printing starting from FF 81, maybe they helped here