Firefox page scaling?

September 3, 2005 7:15 AM

Firefox filter: I like Firefox but everything looks tiny on my high res laptop screen. Is there a trick to make it "fit to window" like Opera does?

Opera seems to scale up the page as well as the text to fill the screen nicely while Firefox will scale the text up but still have it all squished into a skinny page. It's most pronounced in blogs. I'm happy with Opera but Firefox just does some things better...but better doesn't matter if you can't see it! Any suggestions?

posted by HK10036 to computers & internet (5 comments total)

The Colorzilla extension has a very nice zoom feature, which will zoom the entire page, not just the text. It doesn't persist, unfortunately, but that's the only thing I can think of to suggest.
posted by cerebus19 at 8:24 AM on September 3, 2005

In Tools | Options | General | Fonts & Colors you can specify a minimum font size, as well as the default starting font size for serif and sans fonts.

However, if I understand what you are saying, this won't help with the layout. It will keep the fonts at the specified sizes, but if the page author has specified widths in pixels it will still cause the page to be laid out to those specifications. For example, if the page author specified a column to be 300px wide, then that's how wide it will be regardless of the font sizes. Welcome to the world of completely clueless and incompetent webmasters that insist on using pixel-sizes. Sucks, doesn't it? At least the days of sites that say "Best viewed with Internet Explorer at 800x600" are mostly over.

You can probably work around this kind of thing with a user CSS file, or an extension of some kind. Not sure about the details there. But you really should email the webmasters of these sites and tell them their page looks like ass on your screen because they decided to use pixel measurements. Tell them your screen dimensions, and that you hate using their site due to their shitty design. The only way this will ever change is when people realize that not everyone's screen resolution and DPI are the same or even close to theirs, and that using pixels as unit of length in web design for dimensions like page width is really dumb.
posted by Rhomboid at 8:36 AM on September 3, 2005

Maybe just wait a bit. Firefox 1.5 (Deer Park) should have Opera-like zoom. First beta is expected to be released on September 8th.
posted by b. at 8:53 AM on September 3, 2005

Firefox 1.5 won't have the zoom yet. There is work going on on the new rendering engine (cairo), but I don't believe this will be in 1.5, at least not on all platforms. The actual bug report on page zoom says that before this is the case, working on this is rather pointless (comment 129).
posted by cameleon at 8:03 AM on September 5, 2005

Thanks for the responses. I had a feeling that "wait a while" would be the right approach. It's tedious having to use multiple browsers ain't it!
posted by HK10036 at 6:03 AM on September 7, 2005