A thread over on the Newbie forum went off-topic and someone mentioned their N800 couldn't render the NYTimes at all correctly, and it loaded really slowly. It turned out that the Fit Width To View was responsible, when they removed that option the problems went away.

I didn't realise quite how bad the distortion was though until I tried it. This makes me wonder how many people leave the option switched on and think the browser is broken, when really it's just the Fit Width option that's broken.

Perhaps the option should be taken out completely until it's fixed, if it can do this to a site:

http://tabletschool.blogspot.com/200...-slow-and.html

Here's what it looks like on a PC:



Here's how it looks with the N800 browser in normal mode at 100%:



Here's how it looks when I switch on Fit Width To View:

I had the same problem with Facebook/ebay/gumtree and others... untill I unticked "Fit width to view"
you can find the ""Fit width to view"" options under the "view" tab in the browser's options.

once you untick it, everything should return to normal for most websites...

Raise a bug suggesting it's off by default until it can be improved?

Most of us have discovered the "fit width to view" bug on our own... I think a bug report would be good to file.

What's the bug, actually? (Edit: Not a rhetorical question - I'm curios about what/which problem is referred to.) I think it's pretty clear that it won't be optimal for all pages, but for some pages it's essential. The option has to be switched on and off depending on the page you're looking at, which makes complete sense to me. I wouldn't want it to disappear (although it doesn't work as well in MicroB as it does in Opera).

Agreed. In Opera, images were re-sized to fit the width appropriately, whereas in Microb you frequently find that line feeds are added, breaking the look of a site.

Isn't it off by default already? It's off on my tablet, and I really don't think I changed it. While I've had my tablet for almost a year, I only discovered that menu in the browser recently. I previously thought tapping that magnifying glass icon would just zoom in on the displayed web page, and that's not something I've ever wanted to do.

I did file a bug, but I got the reply that the whole feature is inherently flawed and they can't remove it.

Apparently it's a legacy feature that was designed for small-screen devices rather than tablets, so I don't know why they even have it in the first place.

If someone is worried about horizontal scrolling they can just zoom out a bit, and on most sites the horizontal scrolling is minimal or non-existent. I don't see the point of keeping the Fit Width feature.


This is the problem, it's not necessarily obvious that this might be the problem with distorted pages. When that user had a problem with nytimes.com, I didn't think of this as the explanation until you suggested it in the newbie forum.

I'm trying to get the word out about this on the Tablet School site, it would be a darn shame if a single and completely avoidable bug like this put new users off the tablets.

Krisse, I hope you aren't militating for eliminating Fit Width to View in the next OS release. Some of us, including me, really like it. Sometimes you have to turn it off. But it really does help often in reading text.