1813274 - Disabling "Automatic font sizing" disables font inflation, too

Status: NEW

(Firefox for Android :: General, defect)

Description

[Jeff Boek [:boek]]

From github: https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/fenix/issues/14806.

As reported on https://github.com/webcompat/web-bugs/issues/57375

Description: in chrome, text is formatted big enough to be readable. in Firefox the font is -tiny- ...I wish there was an option to set a minimum font size that would still reflow into appropriate width on mobile screen.

Steps:

1. Go to https://old.reddit.com/r/worldnews/

Expected: bigger font
actual: small font

Compare to chrome

Device: Pixel 2
Browser: 82.0a1

┆Issue is synchronized with this Jira Task

Change performed by the Move to Bugzilla add-on.

Comment 1

[Jan Henning [:JanH]]

I think the original issue here was fixed by bug 1685756, and I think the remaining main issue from the discussion there was around how our settings UI for font size adjustment works:

We currently have a single settings toggle for "Automatic font sizing", which currently controls both automatic font sizing (according to the global OS settings), as well as font inflation (i.e. try to semi-intelligently scale up text on non-responsive/desktop pages only).

So the thing is that if you turn off "Automatic font sizing", currently font inflation gets turned off too, and the manual font size control then only controls the magnitude of a global text zoom factor that then affects both responsive/mobile and (if font inflation is turned off) non-responsive/desktop pages, too. And if you then bump up the font size far enough that desktop pages become readable without having to zoom in (and such a large text zoom runs the risk of layout breakage, too, maybe even more than pure font inflation?), it's entirely possible that the text size on mobile/responsive pages is far too large at that point.

So maybe we should just leave font inflation permanently enabled, so that it doesn't get turned off merely because you want to fine-tune the font sizing in Firefox as compared to the rest of the phone, and therefore have disabled "Automatic font sizing"? The remaining escape hatch in case font inflation malfunctions (I have fixed some definite issues there over the years, but our implementation is probably still a little bit buggier than Chrome's; though all in all I'd personally still take the readability improvements on non-responsive pages any time, even if it occasionally means some layout breakage as a trade-off) would be to turning on desktop mode for a page, which locally turns off font inflation for that page in that specific tab only.