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Is it possible for Firefox to wrap text to the window width instead of the widest element on the page?

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Many web pages have banners much wider than a normal browser window. When Firefox renders these pages, it wraps text to the widest element on the page. This forces the user to scroll left and right to see each line of text. It would be really nice to have text wrapped to the width of a window instead.

The problem also shows when reading any number of forums which allow posting of pictures. If a picture is wider than the normal page, it causes text to be wrapped to the width of the picture.

Many web pages have banners much wider than a normal browser window. When Firefox renders these pages, it wraps text to the widest element on the page. This forces the user to scroll left and right to see each line of text. It would be really nice to have text wrapped to the width of a window instead. The problem also shows when reading any number of forums which allow posting of pictures. If a picture is wider than the normal page, it causes text to be wrapped to the width of the picture.

All Replies (3)

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The www.opencores.org site has CSS code to set the width of a lot of elements (1200px). So there is not much that you can do easily. A lot of absolute width values would need to be replaced by percentages.

The www.forums.woodnet.net works for me down to about 800px width without problems.

Nowadays many people have wide screen monitors (1400px or more), so on as lot of sites the wide requirements have increased from 1024px a few years ago to 1200px and more.

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Netbooks are very common these days, and I'm not aware of one that has a screen wider than 1024 px. My Mac's screen is 1920 px wide, but I don't want my browser wider than 1024 px. It becomes difficult to read text when it's too wide. Newspapers use narrow columns for a good reason.

If you entered any of threads on woodnet, you would see a lot of pictures posted, causing the problem I described. Here are some examples:

http://www.forums.woodnet.net/ubbthreads/showflat.php?Cat=&Number=5073215&page=1&view=collapsed&sb=5&o=

http://www.forums.woodnet.net/ubbthreads/showflat.php?Cat=&Number=5062005&page=2&view=collapsed&sb=5&o=

And to show this problem is not isolated to a single site:

http://www.ukworkshop.co.uk/forums/there-are-shavings-and-then-there-are-shavings-t44676.html

http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=798265&page=26

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1024 x 600 resolution on my EeePC 900 netbook with Firefox 3.6.10 - no problem with the first two pages, but the 2nd two do have a horizontal scrollbar. The user submitted images are what's causing that horizontal scrollbar.