I agree that things should work that way. Great extension.
NB: You can set your text size preference on DF.
The ability to set site-specific preferences like text size is one of the best features of OmniWeb, IMHO.
— SkylarP 
No, having each and every site manage this is horrible. Just like feed discovery used to be based on those ugly little XML buttons, and now there’s a uniform mechanism in every browser. The fact that individual sites even need to offer options like that should tell you how poorly browsers handle this.
Plus, site-managed preferences require cookies, and I only allow cookies on whitelisted sites (using another extension which I don’t remember ATM). All others sites can set cookies, but my browser magically turns them into session cookies and deletes them when I quit.
— Mark
With any luck, these kind of site-specific preferences (text zoom and others) should be included in Firefox 3:
I installed this over the weekend after seeing it in your del.icio.us links. It’s absolutely brilliant. It now sits alongside your AccessBar and Bright Focus Greasemonkey scripts as a must-install.
“NoSquint is my new favorite Firefox/Iceweasel extension.” It’s also my favorite extension. btw. thanks for link to Daring Fireball website and to Brad to link for preference on DF – I see similar extension in new Photoshop 3 (TRIAL).
[...] Ustaw na swojej stronie odpowiedni poziom zoom za pomoca rozszerzenia Firefox nazwanego No Squint . Ustaw to raz i zapomnij o wszystkim. Bardzo proste i polecam wszystkim![...]
Does it actually “zoom” the page (like Opera) or just increase/decrease text size (like Firefox default)? I’m guessing the second.
Daring Fireball annoyed me so much that I wrote Dive Into Gruber, which not only makes it easier on the eyes, but also allows me to casually assume that anything either of you two write which I disagree with was actually written by the other one.
– Chris
Next time you know, you’ll be posting pictures of kitties.
— Tobu
Just as an aside, Gruber does provide some site-specific preferences functionality at Daring Fireball. I realize his site is just an example of one with “ridiculously small font”, just throwing that out there.
— Ryan
Thank goodness we have extensions. If you ask the mozilla people why firefox doesn’t do this by default, they say that you should zoom the whole page including images, not just text. I don’t quite understand their reasoning, but a common side effect of zoomed text is broken layouts on web pages that make assumptions about text size (a big no-no anyway).
I use a custom stylesheet to enlarge the text on Daring Fireball in Opera. You can apply stylesheets to any single site as you wish. Plus it allows full CSS to be used, so you can hide images, change the background colours, even the font used if you like.
well what do you except from the apple’s own ballmer :P
— bustaa
I was goign to say that Opera has that by default. But it certainly doesn’t work like this extension. They’ve got to work on that too.
— Yahia
I haven’t used Opera as my primary browser since Opera 5, but I am never surprised to learn that Opera provides functionality that I need an extension to accomplish in Firefox.
I am, of course, aware of user stylesheets, Greasemonkey, Stylish, and all the rest. I use them for more elaborate behavior and style modification. But NoSquint solves a specific problem of mine in an elegant way, and that’s not something you find every day.
— Mark
Epiphany already had this feature years ago.
— Joske
Nice! I’ll try it out for my Dad…He has trouble on some sites and doesn’t want to change the default zoom…
I also wanted to comment on your previous post, but I guess you turned off commenting except for latest post. Don’t blame you with all this spam…
Anyway, you reminded me of that day Movable Type switched to their crazy paid system. I’m still trying to get my Blog back to normal. Now I’m working on Wordpress…writing some mod so that my users will be logged into vbulletin and use the headers/footers etc. and templates from vb…but importing from MT is broken.
I agree with you. Long live open source. I wish even Flash wasn’t that successful. Still haven’t learned it and have no interest although the need arises from time to time…
— GilbertZ
Sad it is that the complexity of the Internet has to escalate so. Does anyone remember the carefree days when MOST web sites didn’t set font attributes at all, it was assumed that the user could select the font and size for themselves. Well behaved sites could do a font size=+1 or -1 for special effects.
But then every web developer on the planet decided that they were an arteeest, and knew more about what looked good than that idiot user. Next stop, purple text on a blue background in Comic Sans.
HTML has gone from a simple “mark-up language” to something closer to C++, requiring the “simple” RSS and XML formats to once again extract actual content from the insane asylum that the web has become.
Next thing you know there will be web development plug-ins to defeat users attempts to control what is on their screens. The Webmasters know best don’t you all see that? Why do you think they call themselves “masters”?
— macbeach
> The fact that individual sites even need to offer options like that should tell you how poorly browsers handle this.
No, browsers don’t handle it poorly at all. The problem is that web designers screw up by using font sizes too far away from 1em/100%. Text-zoom was designed for exceptional circumstances, not to compensate for design screw-ups. The increasing need to fiddle with text-zoom is caused by increasingly worse web designers. This is a technical workaround to sweep a social problem under the rug for one user at a time.
— Jim