Thread

I’m running Firefox 2.0.0.4 and I just love to use my wheel mouse to zoom text. Taken to extreme this will break a layout, but I am struck that zooming these very pages—the pages of this forum—produce unpredictable results. Sometimes the layout walks off the right of my screen and sometimes the text stays within the constraints of the window.

I’d love to understand this and hope someone here can explain the different behavior of these two pages:

This page breaks immediately (with just one Ctrl+):
http://ellislab.com/forums/viewthread/37909/

Whilst this page stays intact much longer (3 Ctrl+‘s):
http://ellislab.com/forums/viewthread/43742/

I zoomed text with my wheel mouse and using the built-in Text Increase Ctrl+ and Text Decrease Ctrl- shortcuts. In Firefox Ctrl-0 (zero) resets text size.

—Dan

You know, I ctrl zoom, shift zoom, and cmd zoom constantly (I’m very sight impaired) and I have never seen any breakings, even with many, many zooms. Can you post a screenshot of what you are seeing?

I’ve attached two screen shots—actually two crops of reduced screen shots.

My initial screen shots were 176KB and 203KB and over the limit for attachments for this board.

Pay special attention to the right hand side of the screen shots and you’ll see the one that walks off the page while the other remains on the page—even the right hand rule of the box is visible.

—Dan

Are you running any other accessibility options in the OS, or any extensions for Firefox at all?

Are you running any other accessibility options in the OS:
Nope.

Or any extensions for Firefox at all?
Oh sure, a whole bunch.

Lisa, this is not the first time I’ve zoomed, but it is the first time I’ve actually studied the variations in zooming.

Are you get similar results? At first I though it might depend upon what I had selected, but nope, that wasn’t it. Then I thought perhaps it was the result a lack of graphics on one page, but not the other—not that.

It must be a variation in the structure of the page, but these pages are supposed to be identical—aren’t they?

—Dan

They should be identical, but one has a long [ code ] string causing an overflow.  I’m very tired so I hope that made sense - that is probably the difference you’re seeing.  I’ll bookmark this to do a bit more testing tomorrow when I’m more alert.  I’m not sure that we can do much about that here, though. I do promise to look into it - believe me, I understand accessibility issues for those that can see, but not well. =)

Just out of curiosity - what resolution are you using, and approximate browser width?  For my testing tomorrow that will help quite a lot.

I have two screens and I am running each @ 1280 x 1024

FF is maximized on one of those screens. so it’s more or less that size.

I’ve seen the same problem on different pages, I just picked these two pages @ random. On this page I can zoom text with two Ctrl+‘s before it starts to creep off to the right. I’m not a designed, but I would like to know what’s causing this creeping problem so I can at least design ugly pages that don’t suffer similar fate.

It’s late and I look forward to hearing, and seeing the results of your further analysis.

—Dan

Hi, Dan!  I want to apologize, I had fully intended to look into this today but I just have not had a moment to.  I will update you as soon as I can look into it =)