1503643 - BMO is more usable on Chrome mobile than on Firefox mobile (can read bug comments without zooming in)

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(Firefox for Android Graveyard :: General, defect, P5)

Description

[Botond Ballo [:botond]]

STR
  1. Load any BMO bug page
  2. Try to read a comment without zooming in

Actual results in Chrome:
  The text is large enough that comments can be
  comfortably read without zooming in.

Actual results in Firefox:
  The text is very small, and you can't really
  read it without zooming in first.

Expected results in Firefox:
  Comparable in usability to Chrome

It's not clear to me whether we want a fix on the platform side or on BMO's side, but I think one way or another, our own bug tracker should be as usable in our browser as in competitor browsers.

Comment 1

[Botond Ballo [:botond]]

Turning on Settings -> Accessibility -> Use system font size improves things considerably, so perhaps the thing to do here would be to consider making that the default?

Comment 2

[Jan Henning [:JanH]]

(In reply to Botond Ballo [:botond] from comment #1)
> Turning on Settings -> Accessibility -> Use system font size improves things
> considerably, so perhaps the thing to do here would be to consider making
> that the default?

Chrome never stopped doing their equivalent of font inflation [1] to make Desktop pages more readable, hence you get this effect where Desktop pages usually appear quite readable in Chrome, but in a tiny font size in Firefox.

Font inflation was turned off in bug 1127441 [2], but you have my vote for turning this back on by default, especially now that bug 1428670 has finally been fixed.
While I have to admit that, even without that kind of reflow bugs, our font inflation algorithm probably isn't quite as polished as Chrome's on some more complex layouts, on my personal sample of Desktop pages I'm regularly using I'd still say that font inflation is definitively a net benefit.

[1] "Font boosting", if I remember correctly.
[2] What admittedly didn't help at that time was that our settings then had a font size control that only controlled font inflation, i.e. had no effect at all on the font size of mobile friendly pages.
Nowadays it would be possible to create a similar setting as in Chrome, i.e. set the default font size for everything automatically depending on the system setting (which is what we currently offer if you enable "Use system font size"), but additionally allow a manual override if you want a bigger or smaller font size in web content than this default.

Comment 3

[Kohei Yoshino]

BMO is an edge case with a minimum (almost no) mobile optimization, fixed header, monospace font, etc. Not sure if this has to be fixed in the Firefox side. I’d implement a better mobile optimization in Q1 2019, at least for the bug pages and search results.

Comment 4

[Jan Henning [:JanH]]

While BMO is of particular interest to Mozilla developers, it's of course true that it's also under our control, so BMO alone could also be fixed by improving BMO itself.

But BMO is not the only page without mobile optimisations left in the world, so in my opinion the general point stands that those pages will appear readable by default when viewed in Chrome [1], but not in Firefox.

[1] Out of curiosity, does anybody know what Safari does on iOS?

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.