Hope this makes sense. Ever since installing the latest version of Firefox, some web pages have been displaying EXTREMELY wide margins. Basically, lines of text do not wrap, so each paragraph is on a single line that requires me to scroll right to read…but the margins are so obnoxiously wide, any slight touch of the scroll bar causes the text to shoot right off the screen!! Sort of like the page was set up for a resolution width of 256,000 pixels.
Hmm, I don’t know if either of these will help, but you can try them if you’d like:
[ul]
[li]First, you can see if it’s a problem with userContent.css:[ol][/li][li]Close Firefox.[/li][li]Go to C:\Documents and Settings(your username)\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles(the folder with a random bunch of characters as a name)\chrome[/li][li]Once there, look for userContent.css. Temporarily rename it to something else.[/li][li]Restart Firefox.[/li][/ul]
[li]If that doesn’t work, you could also try a clean reinstall:[list=1][/li][li]Uninstall Firefox using the uninstaller.[/li][li]Delete the entire C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox directory.[/li][li]Back up your bookmarks.html file from your user profile directory and keep it in a separate place.[/li][li]Delete the entire user profile directory.[/li][li]Reinstall Firefox. If it works, put your bookmarks back in the new user profile directory.[/li][/ol]
[/list]
Just reinstalled, following your instructions & rebooting between uninstall & install – no change, not even before I changed any of the settings.
Ok, this is odd…there are only two files in the folder, “userContent-example.css” and “userChrome-example.css” There isn’t a file called just plain userContent.css. I did play around with them, renaming the files this way and that, didn’t seem to have an effect. (Did this before and after reinstalling.)
There aren’t any files there until you make them. The example files don’t do anything; they’re just a template to create your own user-defined stylesheet.
Also, I just discovered it’s having the same problem on ALL browsers. Opera 7.02 looks just like Firefox (except the pages aren’t nearly as wide, more like 25,000 pixels instead of 250,000.) Internet Explorer renders the margins correctly, but most of the text is MISSING. I’ve also confirmed that Firefox & IE are working correctly on another computer, so clearly it’s an issue with my own setup. Just don’t have a clue what it could be, though.
On the other hand, ancient Netscape Navigator 4.79 renders the pages just fine, both margins and text. Strange, huh?
Note the screwed-up margins in Firefox/Opera and complete lack of text in IE – only ancient Netscape comes close to displaying the pages. Also, the image in the Dayona NJ article and table headers in DVDMG do appear in Firefox/Opera, you just have to scroll waaaaaayy over to see them!
Here’s a reply I got in the Mozilla Forums: It is caused by the property “nowrap” to some fields in a CSS sheet, and this property is inherited by some other fields. So the text in these - other - fields are not wrapped. I do not know if the property “nowrap” should be inherited at all.
Don’t have a clue what that means, but when I asked how to fix it, the reply was: You cant. It’s either a mis-programmed site (if inheritage of nowrap is allowed) or a FF bug (if inheritage is not allowed).
Don’t know what that means either. This was before I discovered the problem was happening in ALL browsers, however.
Holy CRAP…I think I may have fixed it. Well, actually it’s nowhere near fixed, but I’m starting to get an idea of what’s wrong.
First, the problem is far more widespread than I originally thought. CNN, Netflix, Wikipedia, IMDB, Snopes, and several other common pages are affected – even the Straight Dope Front Page is unreadable. Not only with the margins, but in several cases entire blocks of text (esp. links and tables) are missing, as well as images. As always, ancient Netscape can read most of the pages okay, but the browser’s too outdated to handle everything (Snopes makes it crash, for instance.)
Anyway…I noticed a lot of the crappy pages were using the ARIAL font. So I configured Firefox to use a different font, and – VAVOOM!!! Back to normal!!!
Well, not quite normal. Forcing a different font style causes problems of its own, such as columns not lining up right, and often font sizes are way too small. (Plus, just about every font aside from Arial tends to look like ass.) But at least those annoying super-sized margins are gone!!
So it looks like my ARIAL font has gotten corrupted somehow. Next question is…how do I fix that?
This was before I discovered the problem was happening in ALL browsers, however.