282622 - All sites rendered in very small fonts, yet relative

Status: RESOLVED EXPIRED

(Firefox :: General, defect)

Description

[nimbus.ursus]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20050215 Firefox/1.0
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20050215 Firefox/1.0

Every site I access is rendered in unreadably small fonts. I've followed various
guides in the bugs area to resolve this, but none of them work satifactorily.

For example, the DPI of my system is 147 and FireFox has this as the system
setting. All the FreFox menu's, icons etc. are in the expected size and font,
but the pages are rendered impossibly small to read. Any changes made to the DPI
setting only affects the application fonts, not the rendered sites.

Sites become readable when I press Ctrl + 3 times, but it is very annoying to
have to do this each time I fire up FireFox.

My system information:
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20050215 Firefox/1.0
My Build information:
about:buildconfig

Build platform
target
i686-pc-linux-gnu

Build tools
Compiler 	Version 	Compiler flags
gcc 	gcc version 3.3.5 (Gentoo Linux 3.3.5-r1, ssp-3.3.2-3, pie-8.7.7.1) 	-Wall
-W -Wno-unused -Wpointer-arith -Wcast-align -Wno-long-long -march=pentium4 -pipe
-pthread -pipe
c++ 	gcc version 3.3.5 (Gentoo Linux 3.3.5-r1, ssp-3.3.2-3, pie-8.7.7.1) 
-fno-rtti -fno-exceptions -Wall -Wconversion -Wpointer-arith -Wcast-align
-Woverloaded-virtual -Wsynth -Wno-ctor-dtor-privacy -Wno-non-virtual-dtor
-Wno-long-long -march=pentium4 -pipe -Wno-deprecated -fshort-wchar -pthread
-pipe -I/usr/X11R6/include

Configure arguments
--prefix=/usr --host=i686-pc-linux-gnu --mandir=/usr/share/man
--infodir=/usr/share/info --datadir=/usr/share --sysconfdir=/etc
--localstatedir=/var/lib --enable-optimize=-O2 --enable-old-abi-compat-wrappers
--disable-activex --disable-activex-scripting --disable-installer
--disable-pedantic --enable-crypto --enable-xterm-updates --with-pthreads
--with-system-jpeg --with-system-png --with-system-zlib --with-x
--without-system-nspr --enable-default-toolkit=gtk2 --enable-ipv6
--disable-xinerama --disable-xprint --enable-freetype2 --enable-freetypetest
--enable-default-toolkit=gtk2 --disable-gnomevfs --disable-debug --disable-tests
--enable-reorder --enable-strip --enable-strip-libs --enable-elf-dynstr-gc
--enable-xft --disable-jsd --disable-xpctools --enable-oji --enable-mathml
--enable-single-profile
--enable-extensions=cookie,inspector,negotiateauth,pref,transformiix,universalchardet,webservices,xmlextras,xml-rpc
--disable-mailnews --disable-composer --disable-ldap --disable-profilesharing
--with-default-mozilla-five-home=/usr/lib/MozillaFirefox --enable-single-profile 

The only setting that has worked is to set the minimum font to 24, which then
really screws up site layouts.

I do think this one is different to those other complaints about small fonts,
but unfortunately do not know enough to say for certain. Am willing to try
whatever to get this working.

Thanks
Nim

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Open firefox
2.
3.

Actual Results:  
The firefox 'homepage' is rendered in an unreadable fontsize

Expected Results:  
A readable product page for the product I've launched. BTW. The help screen does
exactly the same thing.

Comment 1

[Felix Miata]

Your DPI is not supposed to impact the size of text on web pages. DPI only
affects text sized in points, something that is strongly recommended against for
web pages.

Instead of setting your minimum size to 24px, set your defaults for proportional
and monospace to 24, and reduce your minimum to 18px or 20px. That should
considerably reduce the number of pages with mousetype. You can't fix them all
with larger defaults. That's why we have the minimum size and zoom features.

Some sites are simply designed without considering that people need to have text
a certain size to read it, and are destroyed by zooming. Complain to the
webmasters about it when the opportunity presents itself.

Comment 2

[nimbus.ursus]

(In reply to comment #1)
> Instead of setting your minimum size to 24px, set your defaults for proportional
> and monospace to 24, and reduce your minimum to 18px or 20px. That should
> considerably reduce the number of pages with mousetype. You can't fix them all
> with larger defaults. That's why we have the minimum size and zoom features.
> 
> Some sites are simply designed without considering that people need to have text
> a certain size to read it, and are destroyed by zooming. Complain to the
> webmasters about it when the opportunity presents itself.

Mmmm, can you tell me where I go to get the www.mozilla.org site fixed?

I understand your frustrations with hearing the same things over and over, but
this happens for all sites, not just a few 'rougue' web developers' sites that
aren't adhearing to the standards.

Comment 3

[nimbus.ursus]

Sarcasm aside. I've made the suggested changes and fine-tuned it a litte. It 
isn't a good as I expect, but it works for now.

thanks
nim

Comment 4

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

This is an automated message, with ID "auto-resolve01".

This bug has had no comments for a long time. Statistically, we have found that
bug reports that have not been confirmed by a second user after three months are
highly unlikely to be the source of a fix to the code.

While your input is very important to us, our resources are limited and so we
are asking for your help in focussing our efforts. If you can still reproduce
this problem in the latest version of the product (see below for how to obtain a
copy) or, for feature requests, if it's not present in the latest version and
you still believe we should implement it, please visit the URL of this bug
(given at the top of this mail) and add a comment to that effect, giving more
reproduction information if you have it.

If it is not a problem any longer, you need take no action. If this bug is not
changed in any way in the next two weeks, it will be automatically resolved.
Thank you for your help in this matter.

The latest beta releases can be obtained from:
Firefox:     http://www.mozilla.org/projects/firefox/
Thunderbird: http://www.mozilla.org/products/thunderbird/releases/1.5beta1.html
Seamonkey:   http://www.mozilla.org/projects/seamonkey/

Comment 5

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

This bug has been automatically resolved after a period of inactivity (see above
comment). If anyone thinks this is incorrect, they should feel free to reopen it.