Monitor resolution

Wig

I have put the resolution slider to the Max Actually the max 1600 x1024 made rectangles instead of squares - IYKWIM

So I took it down a bit to 1280 X 1024 which seems to be better.

The thing is, now with the exception of google and mse forum (not mse main site),
most webpages appear like a sheet of A4 in the middle of the screen, and they are not zoomed in to fit the screen.....
I use Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Win98; en-GB; rv:1.8.1.20) Gecko/20081217 Firefox/2.0.0.20 I can't upgrade cos I use Win 98.

Is there any way to tell Firefox to expand the webpage to fit the screen automatically or manually? Text size doesn't do it.

bonzer

Do you mean like MSE news?

http://www.moneysavingexpert.com/news/phones/2010/04/lower-phone-bills-as-ofcom-cuts-connection-rates-to-mobiles

The author has chosen to fix the width of the viewable area of the page for design reasons.

John_Gray

You should be using the correct 'native' resolution for your laptop screen, otherwise the picture will not look good.

Many websites are set up to have a fixed maxiumum width, because the designers want you to see it that way! BBC News is a good example - you can make the browser window narrower, but as you make it wider, then you get a vertical grey band to right and left (assuming you have a sufficient number of horizontal pixels on your screen)...

Wig

Yeah, those sites have only got content in the central part of the screen
http://www.kwik-fit.com/home.asp
Is another one but it has colured sides but only got content in the centre

Seems a bit silly that the content cannot be zoomed in to fit the width of your monitor. Before, when I used a resoultion further down the scale those webpages would fill my entire screen (and pages like this one "MSE forum" were actually wider than my screen and I had to scroll right to see all those links on the right hand side of the screen.- but now they are there for me to see in one screenwidth) I suppose webpage designers are designing pages for people who are viewing on a lower resolution (because at that resolution they fit the page).

The newer firefox, I know expands all content not just text size (pictures aswell etc) I wonder if when using a later firefox, you zoom the text sixe do web pages like bbc news and kwik fit eventually 'fit the screen' ?

Google obviously designs it's web page to fit the screen of the user because it stretches to fill my screen automatically on all resolutions, why don't other webpages do that?

bonzer

Yes you can zoom the entire page in recent versions of Firefox using Ctrl + or Ctrl - or by holding down Ctrl and using the mouse scroll wheel. This does enable you to fill the screen, although you will probably have to adjust for each web site and it may look blocky on some web sites.

No, setting it to zoom text size only doesn't help because the page designer has set a maximum width, which is still usually respected even if the text is larger.

RobTang

Wig wrote: »

Google obviously designs it's web page to fit the screen of the user because it stretches to fill my screen automatically on all resolutions, why don't other webpages do that?

Because designing layouts which fit a possible infinate range of widths is not easy unless your design is trivial.

There becomes a point when it will either break your layout or look silly, so you have to make compromises.

Additionaly traditional browsers dont handle scaling of pages very well, even the ones that have some functionality, how do you decide what its natural size is ? given a very wide range of possible resultions, screen sizes, and window sizes.

In the end you can please everyone and just have to design pages how you think they should look