I have this problem as well. UI looks bloated and my tab icons look blurry. I'm not going into a config file to change numbers around. Unfortunately I don't have a good alternative option to not using FF as I use many add-ons that save me loads of time at work. I'll just have to stick it out and hope FF fixes this bug.

Hi andvarix, you wrote:

I'm not going into a config file to change numbers around.

It's not hard to use the about:config editor. Based on several hours of experiments, I believe this gives the most attractive results (avoiding upsized images in the chrome area):

(1) Install the Theme Font & Size Changer extension and set the font to a larger size such as 17 (you can fine tune this later) to enlarge the chrome area (menu, toolbar, tab area) in advance of step 2.

(2) Set the layout.css.devPixelsPerPx preference to 1.0 to size the content and chrome to 96dpi.

(A) In a new tab, type or paste about:config in the address bar and press Enter. Click the button promising to be careful.

(B) In the filter box, type or paste pix and pause while the list is filtered

(C) Double-click layout.css.devPixelsPerPx and change its value to 1.0

Edit: Added comparison of Windows 7 125% default vs. the above approach vs. Firefox 21.

Changing the layout.css.devPixelsPerPx pref to 1 should restore the appearance from the previous Firefox versions because changing the pref from 1 to -1 to make Firefox aware of the DPI setting in Windows has been the only change.

Hi SomeDude1212, I know it's hard to separate support volunteers from Mozilla, but we are here to help you get Firefox to work the way you want. We can't change the software.

You wrote:

The moderators here keep suggesting that we should play around with layout.css.devPixelsPerPx to fix this. The extension you mentioned doesn't solve anything either, it doesn't even try! It DOES NOT SOLVE anything. it just resizes the UI to other misshaped sizes, none of which is the original.

After you turn off scaling by setting layout.css.devPixelsPerPx to 1.0, the fonts in the chrome area (menu, toolbars, tabs) are likely to look too small.

After installing the Theme Font & Size Changer extension, you will have a new button on the end of the navigation toolbar. If you click that button, you can change Font Size from "Normal" to the size of your choosing. I found that on my Win7-125% system that 15 was a good match for the size in Firefox 21.

In the image I can see a small difference remaining: the bookmarks menu tab bar is one pixel shorter than it was in Firefox 21. However, it sounds as though you were getting a very different result? What do you see that is misshapen?

FYI, you can remove the new icon from your toolbar if you don't plan to make further adjustments. You would use the customize feature (Customize Firefox controls, buttons and toolbars) and drag the button into the dialog with the other unused buttons, or move it down to the Add-On bar where it takes up less space.

Hi cor-el,

Although changing the layout.css.devPixelsPerPx does help, the icons and font in my address bar, though no longer huge, are still weird sizes. So although it works like this for me (for now...), I cannot say that the appearance is the same as it was in previous Firefox versions.

I get the feeling that there is more going on than Firefox just being made aware of the DPI setting in Windows.

Hi Twietem, any value other than 1.0 will apply a percentage adjustment to the icons (e.g., 1.1 enlarges them by 10%).

Enlarging images in small increments is hard to do attractively under the best circumstances, and I'm not optimistic that Firefox can improve this very much in the future, considering the hideous results I've seen resizing icons in much more sophisticated programs, such as Photoshop.

The human eye certainly is sensitive to fuzziness. If you can't live with it, then use 1.0 to turn off the scaling and just adjust the text size to increase readability.

Mozilla is a business partner.

The technicians here see the details - and state, that they can solve the problem for their own firefox. But they don't see the global problem. For instance there are users, who aren't willing to solve a problem, that they don't have caused. Furhter is the browser an instrument for designers and they are partners of traders and other businessmen. If the browser is delivering bad results, the visitor thinks, that the designer is bad - or the business behind the homepage is bad. This is the result of a bug in Firefox 22. Before Firefox 22 didn't exist a problem. The problem you dicuss in the technical detail exists first since the version 22. This is a problem of Mozilla and only to solve by Mozilla.Otherwise Mozilla is not more part of the business - because business need trustful partners! Mozilla just now gambles his credits away. This is the global problem, which we should discuss. I have saved today all my homepages and the homepages of friends, while pointing to Mozilla as the responsible party of the bad results in Firefox 22. Insure your homepages against Mozillas Firefox Version 22 und 23 Beta.

@jscher2000: it is not a question about how good your recommendations are. You should clearly understand that this is a significant interference with existing user experience. Developers released a version which forcedly changes look of sites for many users. Any person who faced this problem says that this is not good.

As a 'top 10' moderator you should separate support cases from user complaints and report problems to developers in their official bugtracker. We do not need advices how to edit internal config files. You could say with the same success that Firefox has open source code and we can compile a custom version ourselves.

Look...here's the deal. I know you're trying to help, but we don't want help..we want this fixed. Not by us, not by tinkering and adding on things, but fixed by Mozilla, so this problem isn't there anymore.

Again, I'm sure others can relate...this has ruined my browsing experience, particularly watching Youtube videos, it's nowhere near the same, even with the tinkering. I personally am not averse to change, and can accept things, but this is a royal pain in the neck, and I'll never stop wanting it to be back how it was. I'm sure others feel the same, given all the negative feedback about it, and the constant complaining, and they're valid complaints.

So instead of repeating the same instructions over and over, which we understand....the best thing you can do, is let your superiors know the amount of negative feedback the support team is getting, and add your voice for the call to change it, or at the least, give an option to disable it. There's really not much else to do, so do that...nobody will be happy with Firefox again until that change is done.

Hi jjan23:

Setting the scaling factor to 1.0 should return the content displays to the way they were before. Regarding the suggestion to "let your superiors know the amount of negative feedback the support team is getting," Mozilla does have user advocates that read the forums. I'm just a user and do not have any other kind of relationship with Mozilla.

Hi Andreyka73:

I think there is a big difference between changing a setting in about:config (double-click, type a number) and recompiling a program from source code. One I can do and one I can't do. However, I certainly appreciate that it would be a lot easier if there were a graphical slider on a toolbar or dialog.

I might file a bug if I develop a specific enhancement request, but at this point, I'm still experimenting with it. On the plus side, this change saves me from having to zoom most sites. On the minus side, some sites need to be zoomed down (Ctrl-). The fuzzier toolbar and bookmark icons don't bother me very much, so I'm personally just using the default settings.

Hi mamefox:

You have a good point that website owners may be upset with this change. It's going to be hard during the transition period when sites are trying to figure out how best to work with such a wide range of devices with very divergent pixel sizes, and for browsers to experiment with good ways to adapt. This experiment needs some tweaking, but I doubt that Mozilla will ignore the problem and simply stick with a content area that very often was too small (hence the need for the NoSquint and Default FullZoom Level extensions). I'm sure people will be discussing new ideas for many months to come.

The best thing to do...is to provide an option to enable or disable the feature. Not too complicated, and something they should've thought of, before rolling it out. Why they didn't, is beyond me. But again...the change in scaling ruined it for alot of people, to give other people a more better experience. You trade one problem for another, that's not solving the problem. And, also...again...since high resolution is the future, they accommodated the ones lagging behind, at the detriment of the rest of us. Why can't people just get a HD screen lol As far as I know, all new computers now have HD screens. It really was the wrong move, and they need to do something about it....as in, putting an enable-disable option, or just doing away with the feature altogether.

As harsh as it is, I have to agree. This change is by far the worst change made by FF, so much so I created an account to voice my concern as both a web developer and user of FF.

The developer or product manager that thought at release 22 lets change the behaviour of the default zoom level, not sure what they are thinking.

Those people, that have set-ups (like my Windows 7) that are default 125% are going to see broken +2 zoomed pages through FF 22, whereas FF <22, Chrome, Safari and IE all display the web at normal zoom levels.

People who had issue with zoom levels previously, I would have thought they would have figured out that they have to ++ their zoom level, so those users that you have have figured that out, now all other users that were running off of 0 zoom need to -- when their default setup is not 100%?

Unfortunately by the response from FF in this thread, for some reason they seem to think that changing the default behavior of the browser at release 22 and having it +2 zoom level compared to other browsers is something that is a good change and is going to gain them market share.

jscher2000 and cor-el,

I know that everyone appreciates the support and advice that you are providing. The problem is that it is rather implied that the change in DPI-scaling that Mozilla have made in version 22 is a legitimate one, which only inconveniences some users.

That is not the case. It has likely affected many thousands of people, most of which would have no clue as to what to do to fix their now-broken browser. The response of Mozilla so far is silence. That's not really good enough, given that they are attempting to survive in a hyper-competitive browser market, and they've just totally screwed up their core product. I like Firefox, I like the idea of open-source, but constant changing of the browser with "features" that add nothing to its usability, and in this case, actually prevent it from doing what its supposed to do, is really, really dumb. I think rather than advising people who may not know what they're doing to play around with about:config, and download multiple add-ons (the combination of which still does not actually fix the problem), they should be directed to use another browser instead until Mozilla wake up and fix this. It should be classified as the developer mistake that it is, and be remedied with an option to disable as soon as possible.

Exact same issue, on a default Windows 7 settings, our sites that use fluid responsive design looks like crap! Thanks for breaking the web for your users FF!

Hi Haterade, can you give some examples of sites that look good at default zoom but crappy at 2x zoom?

One workaround might be to detect the high dpi setting and downsize fonts accordingly. A crude example is here: http://dev.jeffersonscher.com/nozoom.html.

Sure, any major site has the same issue for the default set-up on my Lenovo laptops running Windows 7, all images show blurry and text enlarged. Using FF 22 makes me feel like I am on my Grandparents computer.

www.google.com www.facebook.com www.reddit.com

Websites that serve content / images like our game site http://www.kanogames.com/ that uses responsive design and lots of images, now looks blurry at default zoom levels on my laptop with blurry images and less content in immediate view.

All show enlarged/blurry images, enlarged text and less content in immediate view.

Do a quick google, for those that care enough to complain they will be on the boards, others just will switch to a browser with a default zoom that is "normal".

You guys really need to take this back to the drawing board and may sure all Windows devices at "default" behave like FF<22, Chrome and IE, being different in this respect is going to lose market share and in the short term cause headaches for web developers.

The site that you shared still shows a blurred image and looks far better in Chrome, IE and FF 21.

Here are a couple forum posts from FF users:

https://forums.wildshadow.com/node/214602 http://community.futuremark.com/forum/showthread.php?175948-Firefox-22-0-urgh-everything-has-gone-big!

Hopefully you guys will take this seriously and get a fix to this bug out this week, if you don't approach this as a bug then I am confident you will lose market share from those users whose default set-up like mine, makes it feel like FF is like using your grandparents computer.

So the question is, are you guys working on a fix for this or is this something that you will just instruct people to modify the config of their browser etc like it seems you have been doing? Since Chrome and IE work out of the box when compared to FF 22, not sure how much success you will have with getting users to mess around with their config to get back to behaviour of FF 21.

Here is an attachment of FF 22 on FB home page, how does that look to you?

This is at default set-up out of the box for my Lenovo Windows 7 Laptop.

Look forward to hearing news / updates on this bug fix, for FF sake hope you guys can get a fix out this week.

Hi Haterade, I can't replicate your Facebook page.

To test how Firefox runs "uncustomized" on your system, could you do a two-minute experiment?

Create a new Firefox profile

It will have your system-installed plugins (e.g., Flash), but no themes, extensions, or other customizations. It also should have completely fresh settings databases and a fresh cache folder.

Exit Firefox and start up in the Profile Manager using Start > search box (or Run):

firefox.exe -P

Any time you want to switch profiles, exit Firefox and return to this dialog.

When creating a new profile, I recommend using the default location suggested, and to avoid data loss, not re-using any existing folder. Before deleting unneeded profiles, I suggest making a backup first in case something were to go wrong.

How does FB look in the new profile?

The images no longer wrap but page is still shown at a +2 zoom level compared to Chrome, IE and Safari.

So the bug of images appearing blurry and seeing less content compared to competitors is still present on my default set-up.

I had same problem after crash.

why should we need to change the default values for proper zoom? above solution worked for me. but not all user will be technically sound enough for this.