Firefox and Epiphany crash after today's updates

[Felix Miata]

On 2008/02/01 11:30 (GMT-0700) Lamont Peterson apparently typed:

> On Friday 01 February 2008 10:30:02 am Michel Salim wrote:

>> On Feb 1, 2008 12:10 PM, Michel Salim <michel.sylvan at gmail.com> wrote:

>> > At the risk of furthering this thread (and since Mozilla people are
>> > hopeless on font issues), is anyone else noticing font rendering
>> > regressions with Firefox/xulrunner 20080130? It feels like going back
>> > from Deja to Luxi -- the fonts are smaller and thinner. Even in the
>> > user interface.

>> The font situation was bad already before, but now to get a font size
>> equivalent to 11 on the desktop, I had to tell Firefox to use size 20!

> This is certainly not authoritative information, but...

> As I understand it, Firefox intentionally "shrinks" the fonts because that's 
> what IE does and, therefore,

Firefox only does what IE does when the system DPI is 96. IE defaults to
12pt. FF defaults to 16px. Only at 96 DPI does 12pt = 16px. FF "shrinkage
happens when DPI is more than 96 DPI. FF "growth" does not happen unless a
hidden pref is changed to remove its default 96 DPI minimum.

> lots of websites use bigger fonts than they
> should.  Or, the sequence of events was the other way around, i.e., as people 
> built lots of webpages with oversized fonts, Microsoft changed IE (bit by 
> bit?) to "shrink" them.

It's the other way around. Web deziners almost univerally impose smaller than
default text. OTOH, up through XP, IE always used the same 12pt fonts by
default - Courier New for monospace, and Times New Roman for proportional.
When a web page specified a generic sans-serif or sans-serif as a fallback to
some uninstalled font, IE would always use Arial. In Vista, 12pt is still the
nominal size, but Arial and Times New Roman and Courier New have all been
replaced by fonts that render physically smaller than their predecessors at
any given nominal size.

> I'm not really sure this information will help to improve the situation or 
> not.  Personally, I think that Firefox has become sufficiently pervasive on 
> Windows that they could "dial it back" towards being more standards 
> compliant.  When I say, "I want that to be 11 points," I usually really do 
> mean it.  Of course, I can already hear a big discussion both ways on this 
> one.

You can have FF use 11pt by calculating the number of px that 11pt converts
to at your DPI, and then set FF to use that px size. If your DPI is less than
96, then you may need to change the pref 'layout.css.dpi' from -1 to 0 to get
around its default 96 DPI floor.

FF uses px for pref sizes at least in part because at higher than 96 DPI
screen resolutions px offer finer control of the preferred size than pt, 25%
at 120 DPI, 50% at 144 DPI. Since resolutions have been increasing and will
continue to increase, px was and will continue to be a good choice for
maximizing this user control.
-- 
"For God so loved the world that he gave his one
and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall
not perish but have eternal life." John 3:16 NIV

 Team OS/2 ** Reg. Linux User #211409

Felix Miata  ***  http://mrmazda.no-ip.com/