8 ms·

HN is one of the few sites I always keep zoomed-in (around 200%), which led to me finding an interesting bug in Chrome while HN was down: Chrome's internal "Thi

HN is one of the few sites I always keep zoomed-in (around 200%), which led to me finding an interesting bug in Chrome while HN was down: Chrome's internal "This site can't be reached" page uses the zoom level of the site you would be visiting (if it were up), rather than Chrome's default zoom. Screenshot: https://i.imgur.com/VwFtgQh.png https://i.imgur.com/VwFtgQh.png

gkoberger 6y ago
Is that really a bug?
- taeric 6y ago
  Feels like it to me. I'd expect the zoom to be associated with the site. Granted, I am probably importing old thoughts of it being a sort of user provided style sheet.
  - hn_throwaway_99 6y ago
    > I'd expect the zoom to be associated with the site. That's what the GP comment said happened: the zoom level was the one associated with what they previously had set on HN, and they expected it to be the opposite, the default zoom level for the browser.
    - taeric 6y ago
      But the site didn't load. My browser's not loading page did. Is easier to see as broken by thinking of "how could I set it so that my browser's error page has a default zoom?"
      - derefr 6y ago
        But your browser's connection-failure page is considered to come from the HTTP Origin of the site. It's like when browsers receive a specific HTTP status-code (e.g. 500) with no body, so they render a default HTML error document. In both cases, those are the browser supplying a resource representation, while still technically being on the resource specified in the navigation bar. The thing you're seeing is an overridden representation of the server's response. (Which, in this case, just happened to be "no response.") It's almost exactly the same as how the server sending a 304 gets the browser to load the document from cache. The server's actual response was a 304; but the browser's representation of that response is the cached HTML DOM it had laying around from the last 2xx resource-representation it received "about" the same resource.
        taeric 6y ago
        I mean, I get the argument. But it falls easily, from my pov. If the styling is for all content from the target site, 304 still works logically. If the argument is "all content in the browser", it fails as it depends on the address. And I can see the argument for either. If I increase my terminal's font and run a curl, the response is scaled up. That makes sense, I scaled up my terminal. To that end, it is odd that scalling up is per document origin. I'm assuming that is configurable?
    - ncallaway 6y ago
      I would consider the browser's built-in page for "I couldn't load news.ycombinator.com" to be a separate site from "news.ycombinator.com".
  - forgetfulness 6y ago
    It'd make the zoom level you see jump up and down depending on whether you lose your connection or regain it, this is less jarring. You could say that Chrome is designed to tie the zoom level to the viewport but I wouldn't count on this behavior springing up from an underlying design and implementation rather than it being a design choice for the user experience.
    - taeric 6y ago
      I'm not sure I follow. If the page is constantly bouncing to the no connection page, it is jarring, period. If the page of my "no connection" changes because of the address in trying, that is jarring if the problem is on my end. That is, consider your network is down. You try to go to an address. It doesn't load, so you try another address, the page changes; but it is the same content.
      - forgetfulness 6y ago
        Is it important that the no connection message be an HTML document treated like others in the web browser? If browsers used to model it that way and you saw behaviors corresponding to the switching of a webpage, it was arbitrary too, and in this case, would cause more disruption.
- jxramos 6y ago
  I think the zoom level for Chrome is global per window at the least, it's definitely not per tab.
  - graedus 6y ago
    it's per subdomain i think.
    - jxramos 6y ago
      oh indeed it is, wow that's subtle, always escaped me where the focused setting applied. In that case yah probably a bug.
lukec11 6y ago
Firefox does the same, as I discovered - I don't know whether it's a bug or intended functionality. (As an aside, I keep HN at 150% and old reddit at 120% - those are the only 2 sites I have permanently zoomed)
- redisman 6y ago
  It's part of the charm. Unusable on retina without zooming (at least with my eyes).
- _Microft 6y ago
  Either a bug or an over-eager member of the Mozilla UX team had actually filed a bug with a feature-parity Chrome tag on it in BMO.
  - vram22 6y ago
    Bug-parity. Not even odd parity.
    - vram22 6y ago
      You could say I punted.
jedberg 6y ago
FWIW Safari doesn't have this bug (I too keep HN zoomed at 200% for some reason).
chirag64 6y ago
I noticed the same behavior in Firefox as well. I wouldn't consider this as a bug though
RaketenStadt 6y ago
The font-size on HN is barely readable, I'm working on an accessible skin for the HN frontend that addresses this. I'm targeting WCAG 2.0. Keep an eye out for the "Show HN" coming soon!
- p1necone 6y ago
  Are you using a high dpi monitor but not using > 100% display scaling in your OS or something? It's roughly the same size as most other sites for me. (And pretty much all browsers have a zoom function for exactly this, it feels like a totally separate frontend would be more hassle to use than just ctrl + scroll wheel once)
  - RaketenStadt 6y ago
    No I'm not. The font-size for most text on the site is 10pt and 9pt. Zoom doesn't fix line lengths of 1500 characters and terrible color contrast. The link to the site guidelines is 7pt with a contrast that fails WCAG 2.0. No wonder no one reads them.
    - account42 6y ago
      > Zoom doesn't fix line lengths of 1500 characters That depends on your browsers zoom implementation. Firefox is able to zoom the text/element sizes while keeping the page width the same on HN.
  - TylerE 6y ago
    On Win10 with default settings, fonts on most sites are totally comfortable to me. HN is readable - just - but it's definitely on the small side. The complete lack of some sort of horizontal constraint doesn't help either. 200 character lines are no bueno for reading.
  - drusepth 6y ago
    It's the only site I have problems with, tbh. Stylesheet says it's supposed to be 10pt (with comment text dropping down to 9pt), which is even smaller than the too-small 12pt font that gets recommended a lot.
jdoliner 6y ago
It would be cool if zooming in / out on the T-Rex game caused it to switch your character to larger / smaller dinosaurs.
- WalterSear 6y ago
  The Trex game really needs a meteor animation when the connection is re-established.
  - denysvitali 6y ago
    Give this man a PM role at Google Chrome!
    - hanniabu 6y ago
      Only if he promises to discontinue the game in a year
      - marshmallow_12 6y ago
        what can you possibly not like about the dinosaur game?? I love it and i like how chrome has debugged it over the years.
        jkingsman 6y ago
        I believe this is a joke about Google's penchant for discontinuing beloved products -- https://killedbygoogle.com/ https://killedbygoogle.com/
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
  - Gaelan 6y ago
    They even have the artwork! It's used when the game is disabled by ~~fun-hating sysadmins~~ enterprise policy.
  - 6y ago
interestica 6y ago
Chrome used to store 'zoom level' for URLs even if you were in incognito mode: and in plain text. Not sure if it still does.... (if you changed the zoom level for a site while in incognito from the default, it would save the value and the associated URL).
- marshmallow_12 6y ago
  not anymore. it does it the other way 'round though, which can be frustrating.
  - chmod775 6y ago
    Whew. That gives the site extra bits of information to connect you to your real identity/account.
    - marshmallow_12 6y ago
      I'm incognito for a reason. I don't need to be followed all over, i'm a big boy, i can log in without any help.
TeMPOraL 6y ago
Same with Firefox. I have HN at 190%, and got startled by the error message being so. big. and. weird.
dkersten 6y ago
I consider that a feature, not a bug. I typically do all browsing zoomed in somewhat and I expect the "page can't load" to also be zoomed. Or am I misunderstanding what you're saying? EDIT: People who disagree, care to explain? I zoomed in, so why would I expect it to zoom out just because its a different page? What am I missing?
eins1234 6y ago
Glad to hear I'm not alone in this. Currently at 133%, so not quite as extreme. Judging from the responses, this is actually a lot more popular than I assumed. Which begs the question: Does anyone feel the default font is just perfect and wouldn't want it to be bigger even by a tiny bit?
- Xplune13 6y ago
  I think, the font size around 105-110% would be perfect but the default one is fine as well. It definitely is the smallest default font I've seen on a popular website but it's workable for me.
- account42 6y ago
  > Which begs the question: Does anyone feel the default font is just perfect and wouldn't want it to be bigger even by a tiny bit? I think it's perfect. What is your screen DPI (or rather angular pixel size from your normal viewing position) and is your browser set up to do any scaling based on that? Maybe it should be. I really dislike the trend of giant fonts and whitespace.
abrowne 6y ago
The "View page source" pages too.
sontek 6y ago
Same, I don't understand why the font is so small by default. Just use the default browser font size I've defined as a user!
exikyut 6y ago
I've observed a related issue with much amusement for a few years now: when loading a new resource (specifically: spinner going anticlockwise, waiting for TTFB), Chrome will invisibly switch the renderer over to the font size settings of the to-be-loaded resource, then carefully inhibit repainting the view. But, if said destination resource is very slow to hit TTFB, you switch to a different tab, then back to the loading tab, you'll see the current page at the destination page's zoom settings. My guess is that the interstitial system that injects error pages, Safe Browsing warnings, etc, doesn't hit the code path that says "we loaded a new (regular) page, go find its zoom settings". Demo/PoC: 1. Run $anything that will serve a webpage on an arbitrary port - even an error page or directory listing. eg, python3 -m http.server, php -S 0:8000, etc. 2. Open the resource you just set up in a new tab, zoom in or out as preferred (eg, to a crazy level), copy the URL (for convenience), then close the tab. 3. Stop the server in (1), then run `nc -lp 8000` (or netcat, ncat, or $anything that will listen but never respond). 4. Open a new tab, navigate to a valid website (eg here :), example.com, etc), then once it's loaded, paste the URL you copied. With the page spinning and waiting for netcat (et al), navigate away from the tab, then back to it again. Think I noticed this for the first time a couple years ago. Seems harmless enough.
omilu 6y ago
I had to check my own zoom, 200% as well.

gkoberger 6y ago

Is that really a bug?

taeric 6y ago
Feels like it to me. I'd expect the zoom to be associated with the site. Granted, I am probably importing old thoughts of it being a sort of user provided style sheet.
- hn_throwaway_99 6y ago
  > I'd expect the zoom to be associated with the site. That's what the GP comment said happened: the zoom level was the one associated with what they previously had set on HN, and they expected it to be the opposite, the default zoom level for the browser.
  - taeric 6y ago
    But the site didn't load. My browser's not loading page did. Is easier to see as broken by thinking of "how could I set it so that my browser's error page has a default zoom?"
    - derefr 6y ago
      But your browser's connection-failure page is considered to come from the HTTP Origin of the site. It's like when browsers receive a specific HTTP status-code (e.g. 500) with no body, so they render a default HTML error document. In both cases, those are the browser supplying a resource representation, while still technically being on the resource specified in the navigation bar. The thing you're seeing is an overridden representation of the server's response. (Which, in this case, just happened to be "no response.") It's almost exactly the same as how the server sending a 304 gets the browser to load the document from cache. The server's actual response was a 304; but the browser's representation of that response is the cached HTML DOM it had laying around from the last 2xx resource-representation it received "about" the same resource.
      - taeric 6y ago
        I mean, I get the argument. But it falls easily, from my pov. If the styling is for all content from the target site, 304 still works logically. If the argument is "all content in the browser", it fails as it depends on the address. And I can see the argument for either. If I increase my terminal's font and run a curl, the response is scaled up. That makes sense, I scaled up my terminal. To that end, it is odd that scalling up is per document origin. I'm assuming that is configurable?
  - ncallaway 6y ago
    I would consider the browser's built-in page for "I couldn't load news.ycombinator.com" to be a separate site from "news.ycombinator.com".
- forgetfulness 6y ago
  It'd make the zoom level you see jump up and down depending on whether you lose your connection or regain it, this is less jarring. You could say that Chrome is designed to tie the zoom level to the viewport but I wouldn't count on this behavior springing up from an underlying design and implementation rather than it being a design choice for the user experience.
  - taeric 6y ago
    I'm not sure I follow. If the page is constantly bouncing to the no connection page, it is jarring, period. If the page of my "no connection" changes because of the address in trying, that is jarring if the problem is on my end. That is, consider your network is down. You try to go to an address. It doesn't load, so you try another address, the page changes; but it is the same content.
    - forgetfulness 6y ago
      Is it important that the no connection message be an HTML document treated like others in the web browser? If browsers used to model it that way and you saw behaviors corresponding to the switching of a webpage, it was arbitrary too, and in this case, would cause more disruption.
jxramos 6y ago
I think the zoom level for Chrome is global per window at the least, it's definitely not per tab.
- graedus 6y ago
  it's per subdomain i think.
  - jxramos 6y ago
    oh indeed it is, wow that's subtle, always escaped me where the focused setting applied. In that case yah probably a bug.

lukec11 6y ago

Firefox does the same, as I discovered - I don't know whether it's a bug or intended functionality. (As an aside, I keep HN at 150% and old reddit at 120% - those are the only 2 sites I have permanently zoomed)

redisman 6y ago
It's part of the charm. Unusable on retina without zooming (at least with my eyes).
_Microft 6y ago
Either a bug or an over-eager member of the Mozilla UX team had actually filed a bug with a feature-parity Chrome tag on it in BMO.
- vram22 6y ago
  Bug-parity. Not even odd parity.
  - vram22 6y ago
    You could say I punted.

jedberg 6y ago

FWIW Safari doesn't have this bug (I too keep HN zoomed at 200% for some reason).

chirag64 6y ago

I noticed the same behavior in Firefox as well. I wouldn't consider this as a bug though

RaketenStadt 6y ago

The font-size on HN is barely readable, I'm working on an accessible skin for the HN frontend that addresses this. I'm targeting WCAG 2.0. Keep an eye out for the "Show HN" coming soon!

p1necone 6y ago
Are you using a high dpi monitor but not using > 100% display scaling in your OS or something? It's roughly the same size as most other sites for me. (And pretty much all browsers have a zoom function for exactly this, it feels like a totally separate frontend would be more hassle to use than just ctrl + scroll wheel once)
- RaketenStadt 6y ago
  No I'm not. The font-size for most text on the site is 10pt and 9pt. Zoom doesn't fix line lengths of 1500 characters and terrible color contrast. The link to the site guidelines is 7pt with a contrast that fails WCAG 2.0. No wonder no one reads them.
  - account42 6y ago
    > Zoom doesn't fix line lengths of 1500 characters That depends on your browsers zoom implementation. Firefox is able to zoom the text/element sizes while keeping the page width the same on HN.
- TylerE 6y ago
  On Win10 with default settings, fonts on most sites are totally comfortable to me. HN is readable - just - but it's definitely on the small side. The complete lack of some sort of horizontal constraint doesn't help either. 200 character lines are no bueno for reading.
- drusepth 6y ago
  It's the only site I have problems with, tbh. Stylesheet says it's supposed to be 10pt (with comment text dropping down to 9pt), which is even smaller than the too-small 12pt font that gets recommended a lot.

jdoliner 6y ago

It would be cool if zooming in / out on the T-Rex game caused it to switch your character to larger / smaller dinosaurs.

WalterSear 6y ago
The Trex game really needs a meteor animation when the connection is re-established.
- denysvitali 6y ago
  Give this man a PM role at Google Chrome!
  - hanniabu 6y ago
    Only if he promises to discontinue the game in a year
    - marshmallow_12 6y ago
      what can you possibly not like about the dinosaur game?? I love it and i like how chrome has debugged it over the years.
      - jkingsman 6y ago
        I believe this is a joke about Google's penchant for discontinuing beloved products -- https://killedbygoogle.com/ https://killedbygoogle.com/
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- Gaelan 6y ago
  They even have the artwork! It's used when the game is disabled by ~~fun-hating sysadmins~~ enterprise policy.
- 6y ago

interestica 6y ago

Chrome used to store 'zoom level' for URLs even if you were in incognito mode: and in plain text. Not sure if it still does.... (if you changed the zoom level for a site while in incognito from the default, it would save the value and the associated URL).

marshmallow_12 6y ago
not anymore. it does it the other way 'round though, which can be frustrating.
- chmod775 6y ago
  Whew. That gives the site extra bits of information to connect you to your real identity/account.
  - marshmallow_12 6y ago
    I'm incognito for a reason. I don't need to be followed all over, i'm a big boy, i can log in without any help.

TeMPOraL 6y ago

Same with Firefox. I have HN at 190%, and got startled by the error message being so. big. and. weird.

dkersten 6y ago

I consider that a feature, not a bug. I typically do all browsing zoomed in somewhat and I expect the "page can't load" to also be zoomed. Or am I misunderstanding what you're saying? EDIT: People who disagree, care to explain? I zoomed in, so why would I expect it to zoom out just because its a different page? What am I missing?

eins1234 6y ago

Glad to hear I'm not alone in this. Currently at 133%, so not quite as extreme. Judging from the responses, this is actually a lot more popular than I assumed. Which begs the question: Does anyone feel the default font is just perfect and wouldn't want it to be bigger even by a tiny bit?

Xplune13 6y ago
I think, the font size around 105-110% would be perfect but the default one is fine as well. It definitely is the smallest default font I've seen on a popular website but it's workable for me.
account42 6y ago
> Which begs the question: Does anyone feel the default font is just perfect and wouldn't want it to be bigger even by a tiny bit? I think it's perfect. What is your screen DPI (or rather angular pixel size from your normal viewing position) and is your browser set up to do any scaling based on that? Maybe it should be. I really dislike the trend of giant fonts and whitespace.

abrowne 6y ago

The "View page source" pages too.

sontek 6y ago

Same, I don't understand why the font is so small by default. Just use the default browser font size I've defined as a user!

exikyut 6y ago

I've observed a related issue with much amusement for a few years now: when loading a new resource (specifically: spinner going anticlockwise, waiting for TTFB), Chrome will invisibly switch the renderer over to the font size settings of the to-be-loaded resource, then carefully inhibit repainting the view. But, if said destination resource is very slow to hit TTFB, you switch to a different tab, then back to the loading tab, you'll see the current page at the destination page's zoom settings. My guess is that the interstitial system that injects error pages, Safe Browsing warnings, etc, doesn't hit the code path that says "we loaded a new (regular) page, go find its zoom settings". Demo/PoC: 1. Run $anything that will serve a webpage on an arbitrary port - even an error page or directory listing. eg, python3 -m http.server, php -S 0:8000, etc. 2. Open the resource you just set up in a new tab, zoom in or out as preferred (eg, to a crazy level), copy the URL (for convenience), then close the tab. 3. Stop the server in (1), then run `nc -lp 8000` (or netcat, ncat, or $anything that will listen but never respond). 4. Open a new tab, navigate to a valid website (eg here :), example.com, etc), then once it's loaded, paste the URL you copied. With the page spinning and waiting for netcat (et al), navigate away from the tab, then back to it again. Think I noticed this for the first time a couple years ago. Seems harmless enough.

omilu 6y ago

I had to check my own zoom, 200% as well.