Not everyone has 20/20 vision. This has been true ever since the human race has been…well…the human race, and I am no exception. But in these days of the early 21st century those who publish online still don’t seem to get it and continue using tiny fonts on their websites–like this for example:

Now I don’t know about you but even on my 19″ wide screen display (which this screenshot was taken) I find this way too small to read comfortably and I’d much rather have Firefox “Content” settings set to let websites set their own fonts (Forcing all websites to use whatever font and font size I set makes for some pretty funky looking site content and I can’t set on a per site basis).  You’d think the folks who publish these articles still believe it’s necessary to cram as much information as possible into the least amount of space like everyone was still using an old 14″ CRT based monitor. The ironic thing about this is the size of the fonts in the advertisements on the same site are larger and much more readable than the actual content itself.

But I digress.

So for those who are not currently blessed with perfect 20/20 vision that perhaps includes built-in organic zooming features, I found this wonderful add-on for Firefox that takes care of this lack of content readability called; NoSquint.

This lovely little extension gives the user the ability to set font settings plus much more on a per site basis and, if you don’t clear NoSquint site history via Firefox’ “Clear Recent History” feature, it will remember all your site settings in the future so you only have to set them once. I wouldn’t be without it and it’s made my online experience enjoyable again.

That being said, once NoSquint is installed, the default settings are somewhat less than desirable in that it sets the zoom on all websites, text and images, at 120% which, in my opinion, doesn’t make for an initial enjoyable experience. Many websites that already have their fonts set for readability are now so you large that you have to actually zoom back out to 100% in order to read the page. That plus zooming images always makes for lousy looking images. So I recommend setting NoSquint’ Global Settings (overall default settings) as such:

your recent history

NoSquint "Global Settings" set for Text only zooming, default: 100%

You’ll notice a magnifying glass icon with “100%” next to it located on the right hand side of your Firefox status bar once NoSquint is installed. Clicking on the “100%” will bring up a dialog box that allows you to set text and image zooming for any given site and you’ll find the “Global settings” button on the lower left of the dialog box. You can also set link colors for those sites where the text color for links blends in too well with the surrounding text, text color, background color plus many other site settings that will all be remembered next time you bring up Firefox*.

However, for quick setting of text size for any given site once your global settings are set as above, just hover your mouse over the “100%” in your status bar and hold down the “Ctrl” key while using the scroll wheel on your mouse to set the site’s font size to your liking.

That’s it. Hope it works as well for you as it does for me.

*Make sure the “NoSquint site history” check box is unchecked in Firefox’ “Clear Recent History” before clearing, otherwise you’ll lose you per site NoSquint settings.