way to always force margins to full screen

[slickrcbd]

A lot of sites these days are using CSS or whatever the feature is to put these obnoxious margins, presumably because of widescreens.
I've seen several plugins like Dr. Body Narrow that will also achieve this effect at will.

Is there anything that will do the opposite and force the page margins to fit my current window size and not waste several inches on either side narrowing things down? I can't seem to find it on addons.mozilla.org.

Dr. Body Narrow comes closest, but it doesn't fit my screen resolution of 1280x1024.

Fanfiction.net is getting in on the act, and if I don't have my window maximized, it inserts these annoying margins. I'd like something that works with Pit of Voles and Portkey.org, preferably automatically. Also, not limited to that like a Stylish stylesheet would be, but every site like the narrower plugins do.


The zoom feature does not always work, sometimes the margins adjust automatically. Even when it does work, it starts to conflict with the minimum font size I have set, which is VERY necessary for me to set to a higher than default value to read without eyestrain.

[kreemoweet]

I hear you Brother, it is the most obnoxious thing in the world to have all a website's content squished into the middle 1/3 of the monitor screen. That unclean practice is very widespread, and I suppose it is because the site designers
only wish to appeal to all the numnutz mobile users and screw everybody else. I say vote with your clicker, and stay away from those sites, and be sure to send a Very Clear Message to the site's contact address telling them exactly
why you've given them the permanent thumbs-down, and suggest they hire some competent site devs to make something that will appeal to ALL their visitors.

[slickrcbd]

I don't see how that helps a mobile user, wouldn't the auto-resizing margins be even worse on a mobile with the smaller screen?

[patrickjdempsey]

Funny, I've had the opposite problem with my "small" monitors with many websites requiring 1200px wide and so not having any margins at all. I've had to resort to adding margins to all websites to prevent text from litterally touching the edge of the window frame. Anyway, both are caused by the same stupidity: the push towards 100% CSS solutions for layout means that fixed-width site designs are all the rage again a full decade after the horror of Flash-based fixed-width sites.

[slickrcbd]

What ever happened to letting the width of the user's window set the margins without forcing the user to use horizontal scrolling if their screen is too small?

What was wrong with that? That is what I want, something to force it to always fit my screen.

[Diane Vigil]

Perhaps this add-on will be of help:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefo ... zoom-page/

[patrickjdempsey]

What ever happened to letting the width of the user's window set the margins without forcing the user to use horizontal scrolling if their screen is too small?

What was wrong with that? That is what I want, something to force it to always fit my screen.

What happened is something called "Semantic Web Design" which is a fancy way of saying "putting philosophy ahead of practicality". Someone decided that for whatever reason, HTML should *never* be used for layout and *only* CSS can be used for layout. But that someone forgot that CSS isn't actually very good at layout because in order to get things like columns of content you have to do stupid things like use float and position and position for some stupid reason doesn't accept proportional measurements. So because of that, pretty much all websites are designed today with either fixed-width layouts, or "responsive" layouts which is just a euphemism for a set of staggered fixed-width layouts that roughly approximate actual screen or browser settings. In this brave new world, you are expected to use one of the preferred screen resolutions and to never use your browser in anything except Maximized mode, even though Windows 7 Snap split-screen is one of the greatest productivity features to ever come to Windows. Along with some very bad decisions surrounding the implementation of HTML5 video, i think this whole Semantic Web nonsense is really destroying the quality of websites and is making it more difficult for true progress to be made in improving the layout tools available in HTML, which REALLY needs to happen if it's going to become an interface design language like everyone is apparently now demanding.

[slickrcbd]

Perhaps this add-on will be of help:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefo ... zoom-page/

Conflicts with my minimum font size AND to a lessor extent with NoSquint.

Hence why I asked about the margins, not the zoom.

kreemoweet, I just found out that the U.S. government has gotten in on the act. Look at what the senators have done with that lovely margin:
http://www.senate.gov/index.htm
Regardless of how I vote next year, in theory I'd have business on that site as a U.S. citizen.

[dfoulkes]

I just went to that Gov. site, bumped my NoSquint up to 200%... almost got all of the margin out of there... but I already had my default NoSquint set to 150% and it was real narrow (21inch display) ... looks like the world is changing stuff to fit Ipads?

[therube]

Zoomr, can be used to enlarge the "content area" of a page to fit width - on a per page basis.

Generally works well.
Sometimes you need to experiment on just where to click to zoom to get things right.

Now you may still have (horizontal) scrollbars, but the content displays full width.
http://www.senate.gov/index.htm "zooms" just fine.

[therube]

Sometimes you need to experiment on just where

On this page, zooming just above my (a) username will fit to width the area from the name to the post text.
Zooming within the post text itself will zoom the text area to fit the width, with the username being "offscreen".

[slickrcbd]

Zoomr, can be used to enlarge the "content area" of a page to fit width - on a per page basis.

Generally works well.
Sometimes you need to experiment on just where to click to zoom to get things right.

Now you may still have (horizontal) scrollbars, but the content displays full width.
http://www.senate.gov/index.htm "zooms" just fine.

This has GREAT potential...if I didn't keep having it trigger accidentally and then not being able to figure out how to get it to unzoom.
It often seems like it goes off automatically when navigating places.

Still, I'll keep an eye on it as it seems the best solution so far. I just can't keep it enabled all the time as it keeps going off on me.

[therube]

how to get it to unzoom

On most pages, just hold the left-mouse-button down again & it will unzoom.
On a few pages that doesn't work, for whatever reason, so if need be, I just refresh the page.

trigger accidentally

It was too quick for me too, so I changed the setting.

In bootstrap.js:
> var holdTime = 900;

Now with "signing" & whatnot, you won't be able to make any changes any longer - unless you get your modified version signed .
(With SeaMonkey, signing is immaterial, so you still can .)