Multi-page Firefox printing function so much worse than Edge
When I print out a multi-page description of a specific mutual fund, Firefox just omits in the middle of the printout several sections of information, without even leaving blank spaces for the omissions. If I go over to Edge for the same page, the printout is complete and perfect. This has been my long-term experience of Firefox compared to other major browsers. I have already implemented all of the advice on good printouts on Firefox, margins and other settings and so forth. When I posted about this issue perhaps two years ago, someone posted back that Firefox had never been designed to be a complete browser, and that printing had never been fully developed. I cannot know if that is a true statement, but I can say it fits the facts as I experience them. I remain puzzled as to why Firefox would ignore major printing issues to this degree, unless there is just some internal viewpoint that printing is wasteful and rarely really needed. If I want to look at five mutual funds, I want to print out their basics and spread those printouts on the table and look at all five at once. The computer screen has a limited space and does not well allow for that, not in a time-effective way. Printing in moderation is very useful and important. MY QUESTION: Will Firefox ever be made competitive with Edge and Chrome on the printing function?
All Replies (2)
We are aware that there are situations, depending how the web page is structured, where Firefox does not do a good job of breaking the contents into pages, and some content may be missing from the printed version. To understand what's happening in your particular example, we'd need to see the site involved -- but it sounds like this may involve private account details, not a public page we can examine.
There is work going on at the moment to try and make this better, in particular https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1640197. This isn't yet complete, but once that bug is finished and included in a Firefox release, it would be great if you can try again and see if it works better for you.
It's not always appropriate to hack a web page to improve how it prints, but if you need a better printout just for your own reference, I created an extension that helps in a lot of cases by offering specific fixes to layout incompatibilities:
https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/printable-the-print-doctor/
I look forward to the day that it is no longer needed.