Hope my tiny Firefox!

April 20, 2008 6:57 PM

What's your best advice for reading multi-column and other large-minimum-width websites on a 480x800 screen?

I have an Asus Eee 4G, running stock Ubuntu Gutsy. I really like rotating the video output so I can read things by holding the Eee like a paperback and thumbing the space bar, but many contemporary multi-column websites look like poo in Firefox 2.0 due to their fixed column widths running off the right hand side of the screen (as in this Digg screenshot which I totally didn't plan to have an Eee callout in). What should I do? I'm open to installing any addons or using other software in Ubuntu; I would install non-Ubuntu software if it was clearly for the win.

I found this 2005 question about full-page scaling in Firefox, indicating that it'd be in Firefox 1.5. I gather from ars technica that rendering for page scaling is in 3.0 previews but as far as I can google there's no UI for it yet?

And for the record, metafilter looks fantastic out of the box. :) Props to mathowie for bucking layout trends!

posted by mindsound to Computers & Internet (3 answers total)

Firefox 3 (especially in Swiftfox form) is a godsend for the Eee..., especially if you are already running an alternate operating system (the default configuration does not like the requisite updates). In using it, you can zoom the entire page structure, instead of just the text. Add full-screen view [F11], and maybe even rotate the page, and it's pretty pleasant.

Also, not to be browser-ist, Opera can do all the same things and has for a long time.
posted by zachxman at 7:02 PM on April 20, 2008

Response by poster: Swiftfox I hadn't heard of, and it has an apt repo. Yay! I installed it and the No Squint addon mentioned in this question and I think this is the setup I was looking for. Thanks zach!
posted by mindsound at 7:32 PM on April 20, 2008

Yay! As someone who like to use monitors at very high-res, no squint has contributed more than any other tool to saving my eyesight. Glad you found it useful.
posted by chrisamiller at 9:51 PM on April 20, 2008