If you have ever tried to print a small PDF in Firefox and watched it come out shrunken in the top corner of the page, you are not imagining things. Firefox has been doing that on purpose. And after two years of complaints, Mozilla has finally added a way to make those small PDFs fill the whole sheet.

The problem was first reported back in 2023, when a user noticed that a PDF which looked fine on screen printed at a fraction of the page size. It turns out Firefox was printing the file at its exact specified dimensions, which sounds reasonable until you realize a lot of PDFs are sized smaller than a standard letter page.

Firefox is no stranger to fixing very old papercuts either. It recently squashed an 18-year-old favicon refresh bug that had annoyed users and web developers alike.

So why did Firefox behave this way in the first place? A Mozilla engineer explained on the bug report that printing at the true size is often the point. As Daniel Holbert noted, keeping exact sizes matters “if you’re printing an architectural scale drawing, or a picture of a ruler.” The catch was that Firefox offered no easy escape hatch. Bumping the scale slider above 100 percent simply did nothing for these files, which left people confused and reaching for another browser.

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Edge, by comparison, scaled the document up to fit the page automatically, which is why the original reporter did not even notice the difference at first. Chrome offered a “Fit to paper” style option too. Firefox was the odd one out, so as expected, users did their best to get Mozilla to hear about it.

One thing to note here is that the fix isn’t live for everyone just yet. You can expect to see it with the stable Firefox 155 update that should arrive in a few weeks or so. Alternatively, you can also install the latest Nightly version of Firefox to try it out.

Mozilla has already added the following to the Nightly release notes for 155: “Small PDFs can now be enlarged when printing by setting the scale above 100%, up to the size of the sheet of paper.” The Nightly release also includes support for QUIC v2, a faster and more modern web connection. Meanwhile, users can also test out the new Nova redesign, which will be rolling out to the stable channel in the coming weeks.

If you’re on the stable version of Firefox, then you still have some interesting changes to check out. The company just rolled out Firefox 153.0.3 with a smarter Smart Window and a batch of bug fixes.

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