Why do the fonts in Firefox Linux look so terrible?

I personally cheat...err....I mean, I install the Microsoft core web fonts (Verdana/Georgia) on Linux, and set the default proportional font to Verdana (even serif). The Times/Serif version that comes with Fedora isn't very easy on my eyes, and I prefer sans-serif font for the screen anyway.

Everything you need for installing Microsoft fonts on a Linux box is here:

http://corefonts.sourceforge.net/

If you choose "other" for the font size, you get a dialog with a horizontal line. Meaure the line and enter the length in decimal notation, so if (for example) the line is 1 9/16 inches, you would enter 1.5625 and select inches, then click OK. Your choices are inches or centimeter.

To the right of display resolution in the Fonts and Colors dialog there is an option to set the minimum font size.

Dave had some good information, but I believe he missed the point of the question. I had the same problem with all Mozilla and Netscape browsers. The problem is not in the User changeable fonts but those in the hard-coded areas of the menus and the URL addr box. I solved the problem by using Gnome instead of KDE. KDE does not seem to properly display Mozilla windows. I'm not an expert, but KDE does pretty well with all other windows, but there seems to be a problem or at least a font shrinkage with Mozilla browsers. KDE is a little too much like Windows for my taste, so the change to Gnome was a good solution for me towards a plainer and more easily read display anyway.
--Richard

Good tip, Richard. I lean towards GNOME over KDE anyway. :-)

The problem is that the form fonts are too small by default. There are several places you can adjust these.
First, look for the userChrome.css file (usually under ~/.mozilla/firefox/yourprofile/chrome). There is an example file there which you can save as userChrome.css. Add this section:
---clip
* {
font-size: 7pt !important;
font-family: Tahoma !important;
}
---clip
and adjust the font and size as necessary.
Second, in the userContent.css, add the following entry:
---clip
input, textarea, select, button,
input[type="button"], input[type="reset"], input[type="submit"] {
font-size: 8pt !important;
font-family: Verdana !important;
}
---clip
and adjust the font and size to your liking.
Oh, and please, changing your gui to fix fonts in one application is like trading in your car because you ran out of gas.
I Hope this fix helps. And, I cannot take credit for this fix, it is posted on the page http://convexhull.com/mandrake_fonts.html by a very helpful Mandrake user named Noel Llopis. (Thanks to him.)

Donn

Great stuff, Donn, and yes, changing your entire GUI because one app looks crummy is a bit daft, but the original question referred to "all apps being too small", hence my suggestion.

Another good global font solution is to set your actual 'Usable' screen size in your XF86Config or xorg.conf file. Measure your usable screen size in millimeters (Width then Height). Now In the Monitor Section, under the specific Monitor you are using (you can have more than one), add a line that says:
---clip
DisplaySize 360 270
---clip
and replace your actual measurements (remember, in millimeters). Now restart X. You may have to adjust all your fonts again, but now the X server is rendering your fonts based on the actual size of the monitor. Some distros don't do this well on Install. If you don't like what it did, you can comment out this line and restart X and you will be back where you started.

Donn

Following Richard Kircher's line of thought, the answer to this question can be found at:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=22232

Dave I also think you may have missed the point. I set my resolution to the exact same specs on linux as on windows, so that can't be the issue.

Out of the box, linux turns people off. The fonts on LCD monitors especially are extremely blurry/crooked, with the exact same resolution settings as on Windows.

Programs that use GTK are bad. QT is better but still not clear like Windows.

Until these basic issues in linux are fixed, not many people will take it seriously as a desktop operating system.

The other issue I noticed immediately when using firefox on Linux is that the downloads suck up all the bandwidth. On Windows i can download a huge file and browse the internet at the same time. On linux the download sucks up all the bandwidth and I cannot browse the internet at even turtle pace.

I know these issues can be fixed by going into certain config files and maybe even recompiling the kernel (laughing out loud) but the fact is that out of the box linux is not good for a desktop right now. It's okay, but it isn't good. It's definitely not great.

Don't get me wrong - I use linux and bsd every day myself on my local servers and public web servers. But I'd like to see these issues for the desktop cleaned up with linux. It doesn't matter whether we can go into config files and fix these issues - what matters is what works out of the box - because people are lazy, even ambitious programmers who know what they are doing like to have a working, clean, and clear system out of the box.

Christefano is right. By simply enabling the mapping between gtk and qt things can really get cleaned up.
For Gentoo users this is the gtk-engines-qt package.

~quickshiftin`

Reduce the screen resolution! That's just daft, man...