How to fix huge text in Firefox 3 Beta 5 on Kubuntu 8.04

Firefox 3.0 beta 5 on Kubuntu 8.04 renders some text way too big. It turns out to be an issue when using points for your font size units in CSS (although generally relative units should be preferred, anyway!). You can fix this by

  1. Going to about:config
  2. Look for the setting called layout.css.dpi. The default value is -1.
  3. Change it to 96

The problem appears not to be Firefox, but the GNOME window manager’s settings. However, I don’t know how to change those when running KDE instead of GNOME. Anyone know?

Firebug may also have trouble running so this post has a tip on how to sort that out. Continue reading