I just emerged www-clients/mozilla-firefox-1.5. The font size seems to be all wrong. All of the fonts are much bigger than before with Firefox 1.0.7. This is both in the chrome (menubar, tab labels, etc.), and in the displayed web content. This happens both when using my old profile and when using a completely fresh profile. One particularly unpleasant problem caused by this is that the autocompletion drop-down menus do not allocate enough vertical space for each line, so each line slightly overdraws the next line. Making a wild guess, I think that some software component in Firefox thinks the screen resolution is 96 dpi (which is what many pieces of software default to when they are too lazy to do the correct thing and actually _check_), while other software components correctly query the X server and therefore find out that my screen resolution is 141 dpi (which my X server knows). At least, this is the usual cause of problems like this in my experience. The problem with drop-down menus lends weight to my guess as to the cause, because it looks like the code that is allocating the amount of space for each line knows the screen resolution correctly, while the code that is actually drawing the text does not. To test this, try telling your X server that the resolution is much higher than it really is using command-line options like "-dpi 150". (I think you'll have to start a fresh X server process for this as I don't think this can be changed at run-time.) If Firefox is working correctly, the fonts it uses should get correspondingly smaller. If Firefox shows up using fonts that appear to be the same size as before, this means it is failing to correctly find out and use the screen's resolution. Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. Run Firefox 1.5. 2. Notice the fonts are much larger than in 1.0.7. 3. Notice the fonts don't fit in the lines for drop-down autocompletion menus. Gentoo Base System version 1.12.0_pre11 Portage 2.0.53 (default-linux/x86/2005.0, gcc-3.4.4, glibc-2.3.5-r3, 2.6.8.1-co-0.6.2-pre1 i686) ================================================================= System uname: 2.6.8.1-co-0.6.2-pre1 i686 Intel(R) Pentium(R) M processor 1100MHz dev-lang/python: 2.2.3-r1, 2.3.5, 2.4.2 sys-apps/sandbox: 1.2.15 sys-devel/autoconf: 2.13, 2.59-r7 sys-devel/automake: 1.4_p6, 1.5, 1.6.3, 1.7.9-r1, 1.8.5-r3, 1.9.6-r1 sys-devel/binutils: 2.16.1 sys-devel/libtool: 1.5.20-r1 virtual/os-headers: 2.6.11-r3 ACCEPT_KEYWORDS="x86 ~x86" AUTOCLEAN="yes" CBUILD="i686-pc-linux-gnu" CFLAGS="-march=pentium4 -O2 -pipe" CHOST="i686-pc-linux-gnu" CONFIG_PROTECT="/etc /usr/kde/2/share/config /usr/kde/3/share/config /usr/lib/X11/xkb /usr/share/config /var/qmail/control" CONFIG_PROTECT_MASK="/etc/gconf /etc/terminfo /etc/texmf/web2c /etc/env.d" CXXFLAGS="-march=pentium4 -O2 -pipe" DISTDIR="/usr/portage/distfiles" FEATURES="autoconfig candy distlocks moo sandbox sfperms strict" GENTOO_MIRRORS="http://ftp.belnet.be/mirror/rsync.gentoo.org/gentoo/ http://gentoo.mirror.solnet.ch http://mir.zyrianes.net/gentoo/ http://gd.tuwien.ac.at/opsys/linux/gentoo/ http://ds.thn.htu.se/linux/gentoo" MAKEOPTS="" PKGDIR="/usr/portage/packages" PORTAGE_TMPDIR="/extra/var/tmp" PORTDIR="/usr/portage" PORTDIR_OVERLAY="/usr/local/portage" SYNC="rsync://rsync.gentoo.org/gentoo-portage" USE="x86 X Xaw3d acl apache2 audiofile bdf bitmap-fonts bonobo bzip2 cairo canvas crypt djvu doc dvi dynagraph eds emacs emacs-w3 emboss escreen esd etwin exif expat fam finger firefox font-server fortran fpx ftp gcj gd gd-external gif glep glitz glut gmp gopher graphviz gs gstreamer gtk gtk2 guile idn imagemagick imlib ipv6 jasper java javascript jbig jpeg latex lcms leim libg++ libwww lua lzw-tiff mad mailwrapper md5sum mmx mng motif mozdevelop mozilla mozsvg mozxmlterm mp3 mpeg ncurses nntp nodrm nptl nsplugin numeric objc ogg oggvorbis opengl pam pam_chroot pam_console pam_timestamp perl png python readline rle samba sdk slang socks5 spell sse ssl svg syslog t1lib tcltk tcpd tetex tiff toolbar truetype truetype-fonts type1-fonts unicode vorbis wmf xinerama xml2 xmms xprint xv zlib userland_GNU kernel_linux elibc_glibc" Unset: ASFLAGS, CTARGET, LANG, LC_ALL, LDFLAGS, LINGUAS
I wrote this earlier: > ... The problem with drop-down menus > lends weight to my guess as to the cause, because it looks like the > code that is allocating the amount of space for each line knows the > screen resolution correctly, while the code that is actually drawing > the text does not. Actually, my reasoning was reversed here. It is the code that is drawing the text that must be correctly understanding things while the code that allocates the vertical space for each line in the drop-down menus is broken. I also wrote this earlier: > To test this, try telling your X server that the resolution is much > higher than it really is using command-line options like "-dpi 150". > (I think you'll have to start a fresh X server process for this as I > don't think this can be changed at run-time.) If Firefox is working > correctly, the fonts it uses should get correspondingly smaller. My reasoning was reversed here also. The fonts should get bigger (use more pixels per character) as the DPI of the resolution goes up. I have now done this test in reverse. If I start my X server with "-dpi 96", the fonts correctly use fewer pixels per character, but the number of pixels allocated per vertical line of drop down menus remains the same. By the way, I think my problem with the fonts getting bigger may indicate that an earlier bug was in fact fixed. I am now guessing that there used to be a bug where the screen resolution was being ignored and now Firefox is paying attention to it. The current problem is then that only *part* of Firefox is paying attention to the screen resolution, and other parts are ignoring it.
I wrote this in comment 1: > By the way, I think my problem with the fonts getting bigger may > indicate that an earlier bug was in fact fixed. I am now guessing > that there used to be a bug where the screen resolution was being > ignored and now Firefox is paying attention to it. The current > problem is then that only *part* of Firefox is paying attention to the > screen resolution, and other parts are ignoring it. However, this only explains part of the problem, why the font in the content area is getting bigger. For the menubar and tabs, www-clients/mozilla-firefox-1.0.7-r3 uses my setting of gtk-font-name. I have this line in my $HOME/.gtkrc-2.0 file: gtk-font-name = "Sans 7" This should yield the same result in Firefox as in every other GTK application, but www-clients/mozilla-firefox-1.5 seems to ignore it.
I solved this by setting the display resolution to from "96 dpi" to "system setting" in the advanced font settings.
In response to comment 3 by Tiago: This means there are two bugs: 1. The default for browser.display.screen_resolution has changed from "system setting" to "96 dpi". This is just plain wrong. 2. In Firefox 1.5, _part_ of the code (e.g., the code that decides how much vertical space to allocate for drop down menu lines) is paying attention to the value of browser.display.screen_resolution while part of the code (the part that decides font size) is getting the resolution from the X server. (Note that item 2 above is in some strange sense an improvement on the old situation in 1.0.7 where I observe _no effect whatsoever_ from changing the setting between "system setting" and "96 dpi" with an X server that knows its own resolution is 141 dpi. But it is also worse because the code, which before ignored this setting, is now schizophrenic about it.)
Defaults are there for a reason, if you wish the default to be system push issue upstream please.
