Firefox / Thunderbird fonts are smaller than system fonts rest when reducing the font resolution

[Georg Schmidl]

Potential Workaround for Firefox/Thunderbird (extracted from comment)
==============================================

about:config and setting layout.css.dpi = 0

Binary package hint: firefox

I always reduce the font resolution (dots per inch) from 96 to 80, because I find the default size way too big.
In the new versions of Firefox and Thunderbird (today's updates), the font size is much smaller than in the rest of the system.
When i switch back to 96 dpi, everything seems normal. So the fonts of FF / TB decrease faster than the system fonts.

[Georg Schmidl (vicox)]

Here's a screenshot:
1. 96 dpi
2. 80 dpi (FF font is smaller than Menu Bar font)

[jerrylamos (jerrylamos)]

Today's Firefox update
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.8.1.3) Gecko/20070504 Ubuntu/7.10 (gutsy) Firefox/2.0.0.3
shrank the fonts to about 60% size. Eyestrain! No thanks!

Yes, the instant spell check doesn't crash (at least not yet), but Office word processor spellcheck bug 111931 is not fixed (yet).

How is the font resolution (dots per inch) as in the previous post changed? I couldn't find it in Edit Preferences. At least 2 of us really didn't want the font size changed.

Appreciate any help/ideas. Best yet, change font sizing back the way it was.

Thanks, Jerry

[jerrylamos (jerrylamos)]

Problem is default font resolution changed:

To fix the Firefox font size: go to Ubuntu window top line:
System > Preferences > Font > Details at the bottom right and change the resolution back to 96.

That did it, or at least as much as I've tried so far.

Any clue why the default resolution was changed with May 4 automatic update/upgrade?

Thanks much, Jerry

[John Vivirito (gnomefreak)]

This was fixed in 2.0.0.4 as far as i can tell as mine is back to normal on gutsy. Can you please confirm this?

[jerrylamos (jerrylamos)]

Fonts as came with Gutsy Tribe 1 (should be Band for Gibbons) Firefox are O.K. now. (Pretty small in this Add a comment/attachment box as I write into it, are fine on the launchpad bug description. I don't know what to change so they are both the same size.)
Cheers, Jerry

[John Vivirito (gnomefreak)]

This may be the launchpad bug that was there during beta testing of the new UI in Launchpad. is it ok if firefox and thunderbird on every other site other than LP.

[Jarmo Ilonen (trewas)]

I noticed this bug too in gutsy with firefox 2.0.0.4+2-0ubuntu1. With DPI set to 75 in gnome font dialog (so that there is some usable scale to select font sizes, see bug #114498) the font sizes in firefox are much smaller than in gnome otherwise. Interestingly, with firefox installed from "upstream" (firefox-2.0.0.4.tar.gz) the fonts are OK: the fonts in firefox appear to be identical to the ones used by gnome. So, apparently there is some difference between upstream firefox and ubuntu firefox which breaks the DPI setting.

[John Vivirito (gnomefreak)]

marked as dupe of dpi bug

[Nathaniel McCallum (nmccallum)]

This bug is *not* a duplicate of #11498. Problem still exists in gutsy as of today. This is only for firefox/thunderbird and not for the rest of GNOME which works properly.

[Nathaniel McCallum (nmccallum)]

going into about:config and setting layout.css.dpi = 0 (rather than -1) seems to tell firefox/thunderbird to ignore the GNOME dpi setting and at least makes it usable.

[Georg Schmidl (vicox)]

workaround seems to work

[Eric (eda)]

Bug is still alive in Gusty Tribes 4, Workaround is still working.

I confirm that this bug is *NOT* a duplicate of #11498. We should remove the duplicate and reopen this bug.

As the workaround is functionnal and is only "good default configuration", It may be a good idea to update /usr/lib/firefox/grepref/all.js with a 0 value for layout.css.dpi in the mozilla-firefox package.

[Jerome Lacoste (jerome-lacoste)]

I upgraded from feisty to gutsy yesterday and encountered the issue.
The workaround fixed it... for a day.

Today the old behavior is still there. I've tried changing it back, stopping FF, restarting and reapplyign the workaround, same problem. So for me there's still a problem. I will try with a clean profile.

[Jerome Lacoste (jerome-lacoste)]

Switching to another profile (already existing) seemed to fix my issue.

At least one difference between the 2 profiles: font size by default are not specified in this profile. On the other one I got serif / 12. this one uses nothing / 16.
Will try to unset the other one to see if that fixes it.

[Tim Lunn (darkxst)]

just upgraded to gutsy RC and noticed this problem.

workaround mentioned above seems to resolve problem