Ubuntu Firefox renders differently

Question

Firefox on Ubuntu seems to render some HTML considerably differently compared to other browsers. In particular some fonts/styles on Ubuntu are becoming much larger and colum

Answer 1

Maybe it's because fonts are not dealt with the same way on Windows and on Linux ? Or maybe the fonts you are using on windows are not installed or the Ubuntu machine ?

That "problem" doesn't seem to be limited to Firefox : Googling a bit, I found posts that said the same with OpenOffice, for instance.

In jaunty there is package called ttf-mscorefonts-installer that should help about that : it installs fonts like :

• Andale Mono
• Arial Black
• Arial (Gras, Italique, Italique Gras)
• Comic Sans MS (Gras)
• Courier New (Gras, Italique, Italique Gras)
• Georgia (Gras, Italique, Italique Gras)
• Impact
• Times New Roman (Gras, Italique, Italique Gras)
• Trebuchet (Gras, Italique, Italique Gras)
• Verdana (Gras, Italique, Italique Gras)
• Webdings

(sorry, my system is in french ; "gras" means "bold" ; you probably guessed that "italique" means "italic" ^^ )

As a sidenote, this :

In particular some fonts/styles on Ubuntu are becoming much larger and columns of text which rely on equal numbers of line breaks to keep them aligned are no longer aligned on Ubuntu Firefox.

Is definitly not a good practice.

You are encountering a problem with fonts that are not installed (probably) ; but what about a user that sets his browser to :

• either zoom the fonts for a particular website
• or define a minimal font size ?

That can be done in almost any browser -- not only firefox nor Linux...

And some people do that -- I do : my eyes are not perfect (not that bad either), and I find too small fonts sometimes hard to read, so I generally set a minimal font size in Firefox ; and, yes, it destroys design on some websites :-(

And if I do that, I guess I'm not the only one : there are more and more quite old people on the Internet, that have troubles with their eyes, for example...
For instance, my grand-father recently got a computer ; I had to set his screen resolution to something like 1024x780 on his 19p LCD screen, and maximal font size in windows, so that he could read... And yeah, that makes everyone who uses his computer almost cry ^^ But it's the only way he could read...