I didn't get a big monitor because I'm blind, I got it to see more stuff

April 2, 2008 8:59 AM

Why does my new 1680x1050 monitor, on some sites (including this one), show me ridiculously-freakin'-huge fonts in my browser? There are more details, of course...

I've plugged my new monitor (an Acer X223W, not that it matters) into the VGA socket on the back of a Dell Latitude D505 laptop. Much configuration and X-restarting was required, but I've got 855resolution running at boot, and everything finally fits at the right size and it looks plenty pretty.

Except, that is, for Firefox (3.0b4). When the external monitor is plugged in, the browser apparently takes it upon itself to decide that Metafilter's body copy is too small, and doubles its size. Opera (whose UI I loathe and do not wish to use, thanks) doesn't misbehave. Firefox is fine when the laptop is using its own screen.

What's Firefox playing at? And how do I turn it off?

posted by genghis to computers & internet (6 comments total)

First, type:[code]xdpyinfo | grep resolution[/code] into a command line. Note the response. If the X and Y are different, take an average.

Then go to: Preferences|Appearance|Fonts|Details and make sure the DPI is entered there correctly...
posted by benzo8 at 9:08 AM on April 2

(Obviously, without the [code]tags[/code]... Spent too long on phpBB's recently!
posted by benzo8 at 9:08 AM on April 2

It might be the simple case of zooming out of the browser. If you hold Ctrl and move the mouse wheel forwards and backwards you can change the size of screen fonts. Try it and see if you can get the view back to something resembling normal. Sometimes its simple solutions that work best
posted by 0bvious at 9:09 AM on April 2

You mention x-restarting so you are running linux, correct? Which distro? Which window manager?

Does a non-beta release of Firefox have the same problem?
posted by aerotive at 9:10 AM on April 2

Yeah, no effect in Firefox, but setting it to 120dpi did make everything else in Gnome also freakin' huge...

But you did set me off looking for a hard DPI setting in Firefox. That led me to about:config and the property "layout.css.dpi". Changing it from the default of -1 to an actual integer value (in my case 96 by preference) has 'fixed' the rendering engine.

Best answer flag, then, by the backdoor. Cheers.
posted by genghis at 9:15 AM on April 2

(To benzo8, that is.)
posted by genghis at 9:16 AM on April 2