Improved plain-text handling in Firefox

If you’ve ever tried to read a plain-text file in Firefox, you may have noticed that we didn’t have an option to apply word wrapping to the text. New in today’s Firefox Nightly build, we are now applying word wrap to plain text documents by default.

For example, this file is very hard to read when the lines aren’t wrapped. The lines scroll offscreen horizontally, and the user has to use the horizontal scrollbar on the bottom of the screen to read the file (yuck!). Here’s a screenshot of what I’m talking about:

Long lines are not wrapped

With word wrapping applied, the text is much easier to read and the line length will adapt to the size of the browser window:

With long lines wrapped

Some documents aren’t ideal for word wrapping, and to aid that we have made it easy to disable the feature. To toggle whether the document is wrapped on a case-by-case basis, you can change between the “Wrap Long Lines” stylesheet and “No Style”.

If you’d like to disable the feature entirely, you can go to about:config and set the plain_text.wrap_long_lines preference to false.

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