Join the AMA (Ask Me Anything) with the Firefox leadership team to celebrate Firefox 20th anniversary and discuss Firefox’s future on Mozilla Connect. Mark your calendar on Thursday, November 14, 18:00 - 20:00 UTC!

This site will have limited functionality while we undergo maintenance to improve your experience. If an article doesn't solve your issue and you want to ask a question, we have our support community waiting to help you at @FirefoxSupport on Twitter and/r/firefox on Reddit.

Avatar for Username

Search Support

Avoid support scams. We will never ask you to call or text a phone number or share personal information. Please report suspicious activity using the “Report Abuse” option.

Learn More

This thread was archived. Please ask a new question if you need help.

Why does FF sometimes "reflow" text when I rotate my HTC ONE phone, and other times it changes the text size but doesn't reformat anything?

JC
JC
more options

For I while, I thought firefox was the only browser on my new HTC ONE that would "reflow" text (i.e., redo the line breaks) when I rotate between portrait and landscape. Today, suddenly it started behaving like the others: Rotating the phone causes the text's font size to change, but the line breaks stay the same. The result is the clumsy need to scroll left and right to read the text, sometimes after using the "pinch" to change the size to something neither too tiny to read or too big to get more than a few words on the screen.

What did I do that made this change? How can I change it back? It it documented anywhere?

This is one of the more annoying things about small-gadget browsers; they all seem to do this. Googling for the problem doesn't find anything relevant. (Or maybe I just can't guess the keywords.

For I while, I thought firefox was the only browser on my new HTC ONE that would "reflow" text (i.e., redo the line breaks) when I rotate between portrait and landscape. Today, suddenly it started behaving like the others: Rotating the phone causes the text's font size to change, but the line breaks stay the same. The result is the clumsy need to scroll left and right to read the text, sometimes after using the "pinch" to change the size to something neither too tiny to read or too big to get more than a few words on the screen. What did I do that made this change? How can I change it back? It it documented anywhere? This is one of the more annoying things about small-gadget browsers; they all seem to do this. Googling for the problem doesn't find anything relevant. (Or maybe I just can't guess the keywords.

All Replies (3)

guigs
guigs
more options

This will depend on the styling of the website you are visiting.

JC
JC Question owner
more options

Yeah, I discovered the problem with several pages that had various styles of CSS styling, and I couldn't figure out why things were coming out differently than what was specified in the CSS. Finally, I stripped it all down to a plain-text file with minimal markup, and found that the problem still exists. I've attempted to find documentation on why some things are drawn in the various "Settings" font sizes, while other things are drawn in tiny, unreadable sizes. So far I haven't found an explanation.

Saying that it depends on a web site's styling isn't a very useful answer, because it doesn't contain clues about how to fix the problem. Is there documentation somewhere explaining why the newer "mobile" browsers do this (when browsers by the same names on laptop or desktop systems seem to use the user's specified font size)?

Any idea where I can read about it? I'd like to fix the pages on web sites that I'm involved with, so that visitors can actually read all the text at their requested font size. I'd like to say "Draw this at the user's favorite font size, whatever it may be, and make it fit the window/screen width." So far, I haven't found any CSS or other markup that says that.

Roland Tanglao
Roland Tanglao
  • Moderator
more options

Hi JS

"Any idea where I can read about it? I'd like to fix the pages on web sites that I'm involved with, so that visitors can actually read all the text at their requested font size. I'd like to say "Draw this at the user's favorite font size, whatever it may be, and make it fit the window/screen width." So far, I haven't found any CSS or other markup that says that."

The above is a developer question & this forum is focused on user questions. Please check out stack overflow where our developer relations team answers web development questions like this one:

https://hacks.mozilla.org/2013/11/launching-developer-q-a-on-stack-overflow/ has the full details on stack overflow

fingers crossed stack overflow can help!!

...Roland