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Font rendering is screwed up on my Galaxy Tab 2 7

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  • Last reply by Kevin

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I'm using the latest Firefox Android browser on both my Galaxy Tab 2 7 running Jelly Bean as well my old i9000 phone running Gingerbread. On the phone, font sizes are rendered consistently across sites. However, on the tablet, pages such as Google News home page are messed up with text blocks that are rendered in the same font size on the desktop or phone being rendering in varied font sizes. This problem is also found on other sites. Is this something to do with the different font rendering on Jelly Bean that trips up many an Android app since Firefox seems to work fine on Gingerbread and, if so, can something be done about it as it is an excellent browser otherwise?

I'm using the latest Firefox Android browser on both my Galaxy Tab 2 7 running Jelly Bean as well my old i9000 phone running Gingerbread. On the phone, font sizes are rendered consistently across sites. However, on the tablet, pages such as Google News home page are messed up with text blocks that are rendered in the same font size on the desktop or phone being rendering in varied font sizes. This problem is also found on other sites. Is this something to do with the different font rendering on Jelly Bean that trips up many an Android app since Firefox seems to work fine on Gingerbread and, if so, can something be done about it as it is an excellent browser otherwise?

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Firefox and every other smartphone browser uses an algorithm to make pages designed for desktop browsers more readable. Though you see it more often on Firefox because website designers have been building restrictive mobile sites that only work on Safari iOS and the Android stock browser.

There are certain web sites such as forums where this algorithm does not work so well. This results is 'random' text sizes. If you want to read the details of this behavior see http://www.jwir3.com/blog/2012/07/30/font-inflation-fennec-and-you/ This is described in the section "Incorrect Flow Roots".

If you want to make the text size regular but smaller on desktop websites you can go into the Firefox settings.

  • Press the menu button
  • Scroll down to the settings and tap it
  • Scroll down to 'Text size' and tap it
  • Press the small 'A' till the text size is at the smallest size
  • Press set

Modified by Kevin