Dave, Why is it that, “out of the box”, the Firefox browser looks great (font wise) when run on a Windows OS but looks terrible (almost too small and unreadable) on any Linux OS I have tried it on. It is probably the number one killer reason for me not switching to Linux.

At a standard screen resolution of 72 dots per inch, any small typeface is going to look pretty mediocre, and I know what you mean about Linux defaulting to a really high resolution for a given screen, which produces tiny type.

However, it turns out that it’s pretty easy to change your desktop to have larger typefaces, or even to tweak Firefox to look better. The easiest way to have larger type across your entire Linux experience is to simply pick a smaller screen resolution. If you’re at 1280×1024, for example, change it to 1024×768 and watch how everything gets a bit bigger and easier to read. Depending on your desktop and window manager, you might also be able to pick a different theme that has larger fonts too.

Within Firefox itself, you can change Firefox font settings…

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