Comments on: Barriers to Entry #1

By: ebcgfxgidg

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By: Laurens Holst

Laurens Holst — Sun, 05 Nov 2006 10:38:38 +0000

Yes, Firefox does pretty badly on my 1650×1080 screen (which has about 1.5 times the DPI of a normal display). It doesn’t have a scaling factor in the font settings page, only a default and a minimum font size (but I want everything to be bigger). I understand it would be better when Cairo rendering is fully implemented, but that doesn’t really help me now .

Anyway, I’m kind of used to it now, and make frequent use of CTRL-+ (or in my case, mouse gesture to the bottom right).

~Grauw

By: Ed

Ed — Sun, 05 Nov 2006 03:25:48 +0000

I built SphereGnome_Big and SphereGnome_Jumbo for those higher resolutions and smaller screens, but I was not particularly happy about it. I even contemplated a Super Jumbo, since one user spoke of his 3800×2400 pixel display(!). I think Firefox should really try to execute svg graphics for its chrome, which would make these larger themes unnecessary.

Now for font sizes:

My boss, who loves Firefox, did not know how to switch themes. She is 33, and uses her laptop constantly. She is young, and can read small print.

As someone who must use reading glasses myself , I wish that I never bought a flat panel display. The 1280×1024 is too high res. OK, so I know where to adjust my system to Large fonts, but my wife would have no clue. Both my wife and my boss are otherwise sophisticated technology users.

So I use minimum font sizes and a Default fontsize of 24. (Did you know that setting the default font size affects the fontsize of the chrome? HiVisGnome Big and HiVisGnome Jumbo use large-bold and x-large-normal fontsizes, which are affected by the default fontsize setting. This is weirdness.)

At bottom, I think we need a global fontsize adjustment button, a la IE, but much more flexible (sometimes it does not enlarge enough). We would do well to have a global page enlarger button, a la IE7 (I know that you can do the textsize adjustment with ctrl+ and ctrl-, but basic users won’t know that).

Beyond all of that, I think we need a basic instructions page set up as the first homepage for Firefox. Teach a truly newbie user about tabs, font adjustments, etc.

By: Boris

Boris — Sat, 04 Nov 2006 01:27:04 +0000

Once you start hitting high enough resolution, we should start mapping CSS pixels (which font size prefs are in) to multiple device pixels. We don’t do that yet, but we need to start.

By: mawrya

mawrya — Fri, 03 Nov 2006 21:05:09 +0000

Exact same experience with my mother-in-law. Its funny how the little things really stand out when they are suddenly missing.

I flipped her onto Thunderbird as well. She likes it a lot but says, “except that in Outlook, whenever I typed ‘lvoe’ or ‘i’, it would fix it for me and make it ‘love’ and ‘I’ automatically, without having to do a spellcheck.”

I don’t know about your father but my mother-in-law types an aweful lot of ‘i’ and ‘lvoe’.