When I posted an article on the recent Vivaldi update — the built-in Vivaldi Mail client is now stable, in-case you missed it — I casually mentioned that my only real “gripe” with using Vivaldi on Ubuntu is that the UI looks too small on my display.
Now, this problem isn’t exclusive to Vivaldi. I find most Chromium-based web browsers are a bit on the teensy side. Sure, I could enable fractional scaling in the Settings app to try and offset the issue but since the rest of my UI is fine as-is, I’d rather not.
Vivaldi is not obnoxiously small, but it’s is perceptually small, especially when I’m using other apps on my desktop, as this screenshot (hopefully) demonstrates:
So colour me happy to learn — thanks to Alex for the tip, it’s appreciated — that it is possible to increase Vivaldi’s UI size.
Y’know, make it a bit bigger so my grandad-before-their-time eyes can see that ‘x’ button more clearly.
Heck, it’s not even a hidden tweak you have to hunt for or an arcane hack you’ll spend half the night trying to un-do: there’s literally a setting called “User interface zoom” slap-bang in the middle of the main preferences window.
And it’s been all the time I’ve been squinting at my screen!
Thing is, I should’ve expected this, right? Of course Vivaldi has a setting to zoom the UI: it’s Vivaldi – it has settings for everything imaginably.
Vivaldi’s UI zoom goes from a minuscule 50% all the way up to a gargantuan 400% which, if you’re anything like me, you’ll want to see in all of its OTT glory:
I settled on a less trippy setting of 115%. This zooms the UI enough to look natively in-size with the rest of my GNOME Shell desktop without having the “uncanny valley” vibes 120% presents:
Chances are most of you already knew about this setting but on the off-chance some very cool person™ out there doesn’t, I figured I’d pass this information along!
Thanks Alex!