A little bit of Googling brought up the NoSquint extension.

I'm not surprised there isn't a way to do it in the defaul UI, as they try to keep that "clean". But I thought that there'd be a way to configure it using "about:config"

Thanks, that sounds like just the thing ...

I have a screen which is 1920x1200, and I routinely have two browser windows open tiled side-by-side, with the friends page in one and individual entries in the other.

My LJ Style (S2 Generator) puts entries in boxes which are (suposed to be) 600 pixels wide.

These render correctly in Firefox 2.0.0.12 on Gutsy, but they're stupidly wide in Firefox 3b3 on Hardy and won't fit in that window (both installs running Ubuntu server with x-window-system-core and icewm installed). I might just wait until they fix Firefox 3.

And yes, about:config is the obvious place to look and ... nothing.

Stupidly complicated and over the top fix:

Install greasemonkey. Write a script to add an extra fixed with table around the offending pages (assuming it's just the CSS rendering that's failed).

I'd be tempted (mostly as an intellectual exercise) but don't have the time right now.

The high-res monitor combined with FF3 beta is ringing a bell somewhere.

They've done a lot of back-end work on the rendering code. IIRC, I saw something on one of the mozilla developer blogs about how, in the brave new world of 200 pixel-per-inch monitors, they were going to stop assuming that CSS "pixels" were the same as real physical pixels (because that way, in the next year or two, lies a nasty collision between cooler-than-thou web developers who think 10-pixel fonts look great, and people with super-high-res-but -not-physically-large laptop screens who can't read letters that are less than 2mm high). Sounds like you might be on the sharp end of that.

I'll have a dig, and see if I can find anything...

That makes sense.

That makes no sense, but I understand how some developers might believe that it does.

Firefox 2 works. Firefox 3 (3b3, at least) is broken, as far as I'm concerned, if that's its intended behaviour. The sole reason I have a machine with a stupidly high resolution is in order to get stupid amounts of stuff onto the screen -- and I can read letters that are 8 pixels high at my monitor's native resolution (150dpi, so 1.4mm high). Otherwise I might as well buy a laptop that runs at 800x600 and spend the spare money on something else.

If that's really what's going on, then I'd want a collection of settings somewhere that says "disable this change that the developers have made in the new version because they mistakenly think they know what the user wants", so I can find the "CSS pixels aren't physical pixels" setting and turn it off.

Grrr...

After some poking, it looks like I'm getting ahead of myself - most of that stuff is being considered for Firefox 4, not 3, and it's all to do with stuff being brewed in the CSS3 spec.

What has changed (I *think*) is that, rather than just making a blanket assumption about how many pixels there are per inch (72 on Macs, 96 for the rest of us, with an option to override) it actually pays attention to what the operating system is telling it. On WinXP, I find that under display properties->Settings->advanced->General, where it's set to 96, but on Hardy Heron, you can probably find it an aeon quicker than me.

Sounds like you're hitting bug 394103, which does appear to be related to the groundwork for the stuff I was wiffling about in my earlier comment. (fx: slaps self for not looking in bugzilla first)

It sounds like they've turned stuff on in FF3 to pay attention to the DPI setting reported by some part of the operating system, and scale stuff based on that value. From the look of things, this can lead to things going wonky on various flavours of Linux and/or Gnome. There are lots of comments in that bug talking about fiddling with DPI settings in X and various other areas of Linux config, which I can't follow at all. (I'm a Java/Webserver/CSS/HTML weenie - I know what X *is*, but that's about it, and my Linux experience is mostly from the other end of ssh, where X isn't really an issue)

After some brief fiddling here, I reckon that if you want to confine any tweaks to Firefox itself, and not clobber your entire desktop, try this:

(apologies for any grandmother-egg-sucking-education incidents that may occur in the following)

1. launch 2 firefox windows, side-by-side
2. get one of 'em (A) to a problem site
3. in the other (B) type "about:config" in the location bar, then confirm your way past the warning
4. still in window B, type "layout" in the filter box
5. look for "layout.css.dpi" (it might not be there)
6. if you can't see it, right click in the window somewhere and select "new->integer", then enter "layout.css.dpi" as a preference name, hit "ok" and go to step 8.
7. if it is there already, right click on it and select "modify"
8. enter a value approximating your actual screen dpi (probably somewhere between 80 and 150) and hit "ok".
9. observe effect in window A
10. (if the property wasn't there originally in step 6, you may need to tweak the "filter" value entered in step 4 to get it to show up at this point)
11. repeat steps 7-9 until you're happy. Or crank it up to 250 for super-ginormo-vision.

That's sorted it out perfectly... currently running with layout.css.dpi=100. Very helpful, thank you. Before I started fiddling the (presumably default) value was "-1".

I could also, apparently, have supplied the argument "-dpi 80" to the X-server itself -- and there are supposed to be ways of doing so in /etc/X11/xorg.conf or using environment variables, but I haven't hunted them down.

> I'm a Java/Webserver/CSS/HTML weenie

And I'm a firewalls/mailservers/virtualisation weenie and don't normally have much to do with X either, except as a user.