Firefox fonts too small on Dell Inspiron

Question

I use Firefox on Ubuntu 16.04, but the browser displays the webpages way too small. I have already tried to increase the font size, from the preferences:contents Firefox panel, but the result is super-ugly. For example, if I google something, the linkable text is as small as before while the description text is of the font size I have selected in the preferences:contents panel.

Then I tried to install new fonts, since this seems to be a possible solution for other users. I followed this discussion to install ttf-mscorefonts-installer. However, still nothing has changed.

The Ctrl++ button combination is not an actual solution: it has to be done at each page, and every time I open Firefox again.

Finally I tried the View+Zoom in the Firefox top bar, which seems to improve the situation a bit. But after zooming, when I open other webpages, some of them are displayed not very well and others still have very small font size (which may require to Zoom again and again):

Even for pages that are left zoomed, the result is not pleasant at all, therefore I believe there must be another solution that fix things without my manual tuning.

I don't know if this thread applies to my laptop as well, so any suggestion on this would be great. Ayway, it might be a start. (Even if there is a solution in that thread, the answer is not accepted)

Hardware specs here.

Monitor resolution:

:~$ xdpyinfo  | grep dimensions
dimensions:    1920x1080 pixels (508x285 millimeters)

Could it be a problem of monitor resolution/dpi? What are the possible solutions?

Answer 1

One solution would be installing Firefox add-on, I was using Default FullZoom Level for this, its small and simple.

Answer 2

If your using firefox you can right click in the gray area of search bar, and then click on customize, it will take you to Additional Tools and Features, once there you can drag and drop your zoom-in and zoom-out controls into your search bar. Go here for more information https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/customize-firefox-controls-buttons-and-toolbars?redirectlocale=en-US&redirectslug=How+to+customize+the+toolbar

Answer 3

You can use the layout.css.devPixelsPerPx setting of your Firefox Config to increase the relative pixel size, per pixel. This is the solution I use on a high DPI, 4k screen running Ubuntu 18.04 and it works very well.

1. Click into your address bar (probably on a different tab than this one)

2. Type about:config and press enter (navigate to about:config)

3. In the search bar (if present), type layout.css.devPixelsPerPx until the setting layout.css.devPixelsPerPx appears below the search bar. Alternatively, scroll down through the list until you see that property.

4. Click the number in the "value column." A dialog box, or some other means of editing that number, should appear. Probably in that field right now is "-1.0."

5. Edit that number to be 2.0 and click "Ok."

6. Observe the results in a page with text that was previously too small. At this point, the text was too large to me, so I set the value to 1.5. Make sure your zoom is set to the default zoom, probably 100%.