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Why does Youtube look so small?

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Greetings I have been using youtube on firefox for so long that i thought it was supposed to look like this. Today i tried it on chrome and it looks much different. It's much smaller on firefox.. The strange part is, if i reduce the zoom to 90%, the video frame will have the same size as on chrome. It's the same problem as this but i'm on fullHD resolution so i don't see why it would not be the same for both: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1113357

Running FF in safe mode is the same. Using version 48.0.

I had some problems uploading pictures here so i put them on imgur: http://imgur.com/a/lYmoQ

Greetings I have been using youtube on firefox for so long that i thought it was supposed to look like this. Today i tried it on chrome and it looks much different. It's much smaller on firefox.. The strange part is, if i reduce the zoom to 90%, the video frame will have the same size as on chrome. It's the same problem as this but i'm on fullHD resolution so i don't see why it would not be the same for both: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1113357 Running FF in safe mode is the same. Using version 48.0. I had some problems uploading pictures here so i put them on imgur: http://imgur.com/a/lYmoQ

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YouTube definitely resizes based on your zoom, but 100% zoom in Firefox is different than 100% zoom in Chrome because Firefox uses your Windows "Text Size" as a baseline.

It's common for that value to be Medium - 125%. In the attached compilation of screen shots, I have Firefox at three different zoom levels, 100%, 110% and 120%. For me, the largest with a maximized (not full screen) window is 110% because when I increase to 120% the page adapts and lowers the size again.

This is all a bit weird, and I think you just need to experiment and find a size that is good for you.

If you want me to test with your configuration, what is your Windows "Text Size" setting? To find that, you can go in the Windows Control Panel, under Appearance/Display, find "Make text and other items larger or smaller" -- at least that's how you find it on Windows 7...

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Chosen Solution

YouTube definitely resizes based on your zoom, but 100% zoom in Firefox is different than 100% zoom in Chrome because Firefox uses your Windows "Text Size" as a baseline.

It's common for that value to be Medium - 125%. In the attached compilation of screen shots, I have Firefox at three different zoom levels, 100%, 110% and 120%. For me, the largest with a maximized (not full screen) window is 110% because when I increase to 120% the page adapts and lowers the size again.

This is all a bit weird, and I think you just need to experiment and find a size that is good for you.

If you want me to test with your configuration, what is your Windows "Text Size" setting? To find that, you can go in the Windows Control Panel, under Appearance/Display, find "Make text and other items larger or smaller" -- at least that's how you find it on Windows 7...

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Thank you for your answer. It's a bit different on windows 8.1 (sorry the pic is in portuguese) . I only have a slider that goes from smaller to larger and i use it at the recommended size (the other options are too big for my taste since i use it on a big tv). But you were right, when i increased the size, youtube showed up fine (with 100% on FF). It's a shame because i don't really want to scale things up in windows and unfortunately that bar only gives me 3 options. Windows 10 does seem to be better in this regard.

I'm guessing there is nothing i can do unless i drop the FF zoom down to 90% or up to 120% to have a similar video window size, right? Although i don't like to scale up since it also stretches non vectorial images and makes them look blurry. By the way, this only happens when i'm connected to my external TV in fullhd which is what i use the most.. if i revert back to the laptop screen (which is 1366x768), youtube will show up fine at 100% in FF and the sliding bar that adjusts text and objects in windows gets greyed out.

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Yes, I agree you should not change the Windows Text Size if you do not need to.

I don't know if there is a way to overcome the YouTube resizing algorithm and "perfect size" the site. Zoom is the quickest way; there might be an add-on solution to tweak it further.