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Just now, when reloading Stack Overflow on my mobile, the font sizes have been enlarged:

screenshot of questions view on mobile

I'm aware that the mobile views are deprecated, but this change doesn't look intentional.

The font sizes increases from 17px to 20.9231px on question titles.

It's quite hard to see exactly how large the title gets compared to the other text; I'd recommend dragging your browser window to a mobile size to experience this yourself.
GIF: https://i.ibb.co/v3cZ8R1/Screen-Recording-2023-07-24-at-20-17-09.gif

The best comparison I've got is from my open tabs on my phone:

comparison of before and after title sizes

Asking here as this seems platform-wide.

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  • 7
    Just had a look, and gotta say I agree, the font is noticeably larger than it was earlier today, and indeed far too large IMO. Although it only appears to be headers (question titles, "All Questions", "### questions", etc.) that it affects, normal text like usernames, question content are fine.
    – Nick is tired
    Commented Jul 24, 2023 at 18:18
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    Yeah, the decreased density on the /Questions made me refresh a half dozen times thinking it was my phone because it seemed too flaky to be intentional. Hopefully a dumb CSS bug that can easily rolled back
    – AMtwo
    Commented Jul 24, 2023 at 18:23
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    Just FYI: There is, at this point, no such thing as "mobile view" for main and meta sites. It's all one page, which is "responsive", with "responsive" meaning that the same page will be (mostly) viewable using any screen width/viewport width from whatever minimum SE thinks is the minimum on which the page should be displayed (typically defined by the narrow widths of smartphones, but seems to be 320 pixels for SE) up to the maximum site width which SE thinks you should have your window set to, which is 1264 pixels when showing the left navigation and 1100 pixels without left navigation.
    – Makyen
    Commented Jul 24, 2023 at 18:27
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    Thanks for the report @0stone0! This is due to a change in our design system Stacks that was shipped earlier today. I have a fix en route that should be live by end of day.
    – Dan Cormier Staff
    Commented Jul 24, 2023 at 19:12
  • @DanCormier I'm not sure if you are the right person to ask but it has always irked me that the stack exchange home page does not have the same "responsiveness" as the other sites and seems rather "outdated" in terms of design. Is that intentional?
    – bobeyt6
    Commented Jul 24, 2023 at 19:31
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    @bobeyt6isstricken: I assume you mean stackexchange.com? I believe it runs on an older/different version of the codebase compared to the regular Q&A sites, and has not been updated to be responsive. I don't think it's an intentional choice, just a matter of it not being touched in a while.
    – V2Blast
    Commented Jul 24, 2023 at 19:34
  • @V2Blast yes, is there reason as to why it has not been updated or is it just too old?Edit: I see, maybe it would be nice to update it if possible.
    – bobeyt6
    Commented Jul 24, 2023 at 19:35
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    hah. Maybe its just dumb luck or caching, but super user still looks oversized and it had me confused this morning
    – Journeyman Geek
    Commented Jul 25, 2023 at 0:06
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    @JourneymanGeekOnStrike I don't think any other site besides SO and MSE have been fixed yet.
    – bobeyt6
    Commented Jul 25, 2023 at 14:54
  • @V2Blast Yes, That is true. I've read the tour page ang the upvote/downvote/accept buttons look outdated as well
    – someuser
    Commented Aug 1, 2023 at 16:09

1 Answer 1

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tl;dr: This bug has been patched in our design system and the update has been shipped to production.

Good catch @0stone0!

This was due to a change to some font-size values to replace explicit pixel values with calculated values based on custom properties. To be honest, I'm not sure why the calculated values cause this issue and explicit pixel values don't. Nevertheless, changing back to explicit pixel values resolves the issue.

Note: The cache on each network site needs to clear individually, so this may take a few days to be reflected.

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    I don't believe so @M--ßţřịƙïñĝ. The changes (github.com/StackExchange/Stacks/pull/1363/files) don't include alterations to any components that would impact the width of a post as far as I can tell.
    – Dan Cormier Staff
    Commented Jul 24, 2023 at 21:13
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    Any progress on fixing any of the other font sizing / layout issues on mobile? meta.stackexchange.com/a/367616/222623 My first time chasing this post from 2 years ago but feels like an opportune time.
    – grg
    Commented Jul 24, 2023 at 21:49
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    When will I see this be fixed? It's still broken on many main sites (SO, ELU, ELL, Movies&TV, Academia)
    – Laurel
    Commented Jul 24, 2023 at 22:12
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    @Laurel Many network sites are requesting an outdated version of our compiled CSS without this fix. The cache may need to be purged to resolve this. I've made a request to an SRE for this, but it may be delayed until tomorrow. Sorry for the delay and thanks for being patient.
    – Dan Cormier Staff
    Commented Jul 24, 2023 at 22:50
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    @DanCormier FYI, I believe the Math meta Has mathstackexchange changed its font size? post is about this same issue.
    – John Omielan
    Commented Jul 24, 2023 at 22:57
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    @M--ßţřịƙïñĝ there's a change (reduce) in maximum post width sometime after 2017.
    – Meta Andrew T.
    Commented Jul 25, 2023 at 8:45
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    The font size is still huge on some of the SE sites. Even after cache purge. Eg. Cooking.SE.
    – Roddy of the Frozen Peas
    Commented Jul 25, 2023 at 14:11
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    @Roddy It's not (just) caching on your machine. The update has to travel through the CDN for each site. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_delivery_network
    – PM 2Ring
    Commented Jul 25, 2023 at 15:13
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    It's still not fixed after 4 days. How much longer will it take to get it through the CDN?
    – Emil Jeřábek
    Commented Jul 28, 2023 at 11:15
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    We are still experiencing this issue on Stack Overflow en español. Maybe wait a bit longer? Or it happens to be another issue?
    – Mauricio Contreras
    Commented Jul 28, 2023 at 18:43
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    CV and Maths still reeling...
    – User1865345
    Commented Jul 29, 2023 at 3:35
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    Ask Ubuntu still has this issue on mobile as well...
    – Artur Meinild
    Commented Jul 29, 2023 at 6:08
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    @DanCormier what's going on since this still an issue on some sites?
    – Artur Meinild
    Commented Jul 31, 2023 at 5:48
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    After a week, Stack Overflow in Portuguese is still with this problem. Is it still a cache issue?
    – hkotsubo
    Commented Jul 31, 2023 at 12:06
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    I think we've finally hit the cache expiration on all sites 🎉 Thanks for being patient and please let me know if you find any sites that still have this issue after giving them a hard refresh.
    – Dan Cormier Staff
    Commented Jul 31, 2023 at 21:37

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