Barriers to Entry #1
Was at my parents’ house last night after trick or treating and “fixed” the resolution in use for their new LCD monitor (was set to 1024×768 instead of 1280×1024, a huge pet peeve for me). I turned on large icons and fonts and rebooted, thinking everything was the same size, and shouldn’t be a problem. Lo and behold, when my dad sat down, he promptly reset the display resolution because “the fonts were too small.” After exercising the tech support “report to reality translation” part of my brain for a while, I discovered that the fonts he was having trouble with were in Firefox (which wasn’t open still), in the content pane (not the desktop icons he was pointing at). Another 25% bump in the Firefox fonts pane and a judicious setting of a minimum font size later, we were in business, and he was finally able to accept that maybe LCDs needed to be run at native resolution.
The moral of the story? Having to remember to set the font sizes in Firefox separately was a barrier to entry for my dad running at native resolution, and other users with those settings already cranked who try Firefox might not find the font prefs, or even figure out that they exist, before they just decide to go back to IE because “I can’t read webpages in Firefox.” In an ideal world we pick up changes to system font sizes and follow the OS lead, but I don’t know how that particular piece of voodoo works. It does strike me, as we move towards higher resolutions in the same physical space (think 1920×1200 on a 15.4″ laptop display) that this is something we need to figure out.
More thoughts on this later.
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’.
November 3rd, 2006 at 5:05 pmOnce 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.
November 3rd, 2006 at 9:27 pmI 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.
November 4th, 2006 at 11:25 pmYes, 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
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June 1st, 2007 at 7:40 am