208679 - [RFE] Smart text zoom level handling policy

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 108391

(Core :: Layout: Text and Fonts, enhancement)

Description

[Nicolas Mailhot]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.4) Gecko/20030530
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.4) Gecko/20030530

.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:

Comment 1

[Nicolas Mailhot]

[ I suspect this has already been debated to death but here is my take on text
sizing ]

1. Each user has a preferred text size depending on its eyes condition.

2. Each web site has its own text sizing policy, which can be absolute or
relative, and use either the user browser-specified text size, a pixel value or
a random site-specific point value as site size baseline

[ And each of them is *wrong*. I've seen sites with different sizing depending
on the OS of the target audience - since typically linux font rendering is
smaller than Windows one-, others that used small fonts to cram more content in
the screen, others that used a small font to look more serious or follow
paper-medium font sizes - sometimes whole pages defined as 80% font size because
the author liked 10pt and assumed browser baseline would be 12t. Sometimes when
one browses a windows site in a linux browser when the designer used the
smallest readable size on *his* box the results can be microscopic ]

Comment 2

[Nicolas Mailhot]

Right now moz font sizing is global ie one can't shrink only big sites or
enlarge small ones, zoom is inherited in a tab across sites even when they have
nothing in common text-sizing wise and new windows start at default zoom even if
the user already visited the site and shrinked/enlarged it before.

Minimum font size is not a solution - it doesn't help for pages with big fonts
and one usually does not set it to preferred font size - only minimum legible one.

ctrl++ ctrl+- / mouse wheel helps a lot but it's a sysiphus work since none of
it is ever remembered right.

Comment 3

[Nicolas Mailhot]

So what I'd really like to is have a smart browser (ie one that does the heavy
work instead of me and *remembers* my choices).

1. The user specifies a preferred font size somewhere

2. Whenever a new page is loaded (ie page from an unknown site or with an
unknown css) its text is automatically zoomed so that most of the text matches
this preferred font size [ with a toggle in the status bar to warn of the
zooming/reset to designer font sizing ]

3. The user can adjust zooming by resetting size to original or fine-adjust in
with the mouse wheel or keyboard shortcuts

4. The zoom level is remembered by the browser in a cache. It's then applied to
all new pages from the same site and/or that use the same css.

5. Browser zoom level is applied over this. When I make a presentation or
something that needs big fonts I want 200% to mean "200% of the size defined by
the previous policy" and 100% to reset to my usual/saved zoom level. (any zoom
policy that takes designer font size as baseline is broken anyway since they
can't agree on what default font size means)

Comment 4

[Nicolas Mailhot]

This doesn't need to be the default - like tabs *lots* of people like them but
not everyone uses them by default. But it *would* be a sane policy and I suspect
a very popular one.

[ and *I* don't care if it breaks some site's layout - if they followed the
browser default size hint they wouldn't be auto-zoomed here, and I damn right
want to be able to break layout by zooming on all the sites I want to. Screw
"creative" designers - if I go to a site it's to *read* actual information, if I
wanted pretty illegible font effects I'd buy art brochures ]

Comment 5

[David Baron :dbaron: (⌚️UTC-4, no longer working on Mozilla)]

See bug 131236 for why we don't want to remember text zoom across domains.  Full
zoom, once implemented (bug 4821) might persist longer.

Among the most important rules in bugzilla is that there should only be one
issue per bug.  You seem to be mentioning a lot of things here.  However, I
think there's already a bug describing the preferred solution for the problems
you mention

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 108391 ***

Comment 6

[Nicolas Mailhot]

I've long hesitated about writing several bugs, adding my grain of salt to
existing issues or opening a new one.

I finally decided to write a single new one after seing parts of what I demand
refuted in other bugs. While I really would not mind a progressive
implementation each part of the proposal depends on the others and can not have
its full meaning without them. So I feared people would take the parts they
don't like, examine them without looking at the rest of the proposal and shot
them down individually.

At least here one can see how everything fits together.

Would you be more confortable with this bug as a meta-bug and a child bug per
point ?

Comment 7

[David Baron :dbaron: (⌚️UTC-4, no longer working on Mozilla)]

There's no point filing bugs that are just going to be marked wontfix.