‘the uninitiated’ thank you.
I’ve got myopia and typing control++ on every-page is such a chore.
— tabbot 
Doesn’t Firefox 3 already remember site-specific zoom levels?
— Rahul
@Rahul, I think so. First I was annoyed that some pages came pre-zoomed, then I remembered I had zoomed in earlier myself. :)
More useful hidden prefs in Firefox 3 beta 4:
browser.zoom.full = false // restore the old zoom behaviour (text only, not images)
browser.zoom.siteSpecific = true // I suppose this remembers the per-page zoom levels
— 8jean
Yea. I’ve been running the nightlies for a while and they seem to apply changed zoom levels to the entire domain. Does NoSquint add additional features?
8jean: As of beta 4, you don’t need to set browser.zoom.full in about:config. Just toggle View > Zoom > Zoom Text Only.
NoSquint does add additional features. It allows you to specify the default zoom level for new sites, control the percent change when you increase or decrease the zoom level, and displays the current zoom level in the status bar.
— Mark
I tried out swiftweasel based on your mention of it here. Good idea in theory, although I’d like to see figures that -O3 was a better idea than -Os for modern machines. However, in practise, the shell script wrappers appear to be a total train wreck:
$ swiftweasel
/usr/local/swiftweasel/swiftweasel: line 59: cd: /home/butters/.mozilla: No such file or directory
cp: cannot stat `/home/butters/.mozilla/firefox’: No such file or directory
mv: cannot stat `firefox’: No such file or directory
mv: cannot stat `swiftweasel’: No such file or directory
/usr/local/swiftweasel/swiftweasel: line 64: cd: /home/butters/.mozilla/swiftweasel: No such file or directory
awk: cmd. line:1: fatal: cannot open file `profiles.ini’ for reading (No such file or directory)
mv: missing destination file operand after `tmp1′
Try `mv –help’ for more information.
cp: cannot stat `./tmp1/extensions’: No such file or directory
cp: cannot stat `./tmp1/*’: No such file or directory
mv: missing destination file operand after `tmp2′
Try `mv –help’ for more information.
no settings directory check file creation bypassed
— Jon
Jon: It’s not so much -O3 vs -Os that is the win as is compiling for your modern CPU architecture instead of the 486.
— James
I _still_ find that a good userContent.css stored locally and applied globally to all websites is my best insurance against crap web design and gawdawful fontification. Mine starts with disabling any large/small font scaling (use H-tags for your headers, damnit!) and making a hard specification of the preferred font and face. Bonus is that you can disable a hell of a lot of standard banner sizes as well. I add a few nice plusses like highlighting links on hover and bright-highlighting on click, and adding tags to various media types, particularly email, PDF, and javascript links.
Karsten: try Stylish instead. It’s about a million times more convenient than twiddling userContent.css and restarting, over and over and over and over, for every change.
I also find it helpful to use these two bookmarklets:
javascript:t=true;d=document;c='click';g=getComputedStyle;b='white';p=d.createElement('p');q=p.style;q.position='fixed';q.top='42%';q.left='32%';q.width='36%';q.height='16%';q.border='1px%20black%20solid';q.backgroundColor=b;q.color='black';q.padding='0.5em';q.textAlign='center';p.innerHTML='Click%20a%20block%20of%20wimpy%20grey%20text%20to%20turn%20all%20text%20that%20colour%20a%20nice,%20readable%20black.';d.body.appendChild(p);h=function(e){c=g(e.target,'').getPropertyCSSValue('color').cssText;n=d.getElementsByTagName('*');for(i=0;i<n.length;i++){if(g(n[i],”).getPropertyCSSValue(’color’).cssText==c){n[i].style.color=’black’}};removeEventListener(c,h,t);p.parentNode.removeChild(p);clearInterval(o)};addEventListener(c,h,t);void(o=setInterval(function(){if(q.backgroundColor==b){q.backgroundColor=’yellow’}else{q.backgroundColor=b}},1500));
To turn text completely black rather than some shade of gray as some websites would have you try to read through glare.
javascript:t=true;d=document;a=addEventListener;r=removeEventListener;n='click';v='keypress';s='30em';b='white';p=d.createElement('p');q=p.style;q.position='fixed';q.top='42%';q.left='32%';q.width='36%';q.height='16%';q.border='1px%20black%20solid';q.backgroundColor=b;q.color='black';q.padding='0.5em';q.textAlign='center';p.innerHTML='Click%20a%20block%20of%20text%20until%20as%20much%20of%20the%20page%20as%20you%20want%20is%20a%20readable%20width.%20Then%20ctrl-click%20if%20you%20want%20it%20centred.%20Press%20esc%20to%20finish.';d.body.appendChild(p);h=function(e){if(e.ctrlKey){c(e.target)}else{m(e.target)}};a(n,h,t);f=function(e){if(e.keyCode==27){r(n,h,t);r(v,f,t);p.parentNode.removeChild(p);clearInterval(o)}};a(v,f,t);m=function(e){u=e.style;if(e.parentNode.style!=undefined){if(u.width==s){m(e.parentNode)}else{u.width=s}}};c=function(e){z=e.parentNode;if(z.style!=undefined){if(z.style.width==s){c(z)}else{e.style.margin='0%20auto'}}};void(o=setInterval(function(){if(q.backgroundColor==b){q.backgroundColor='yellow'}else{q.backgroundColor=b}},1500))
To make blocks (and then parents of blocks) exactly 30em wide and optionally centred.