Firefox 4 vs Chrome font rendering

I thought my eyes were getting bad, but no. I have successfully updated to FF4 recently with all my addons and customizations, then BAM what the beep is this? It’s like an extra sweep of cleartype is applied..

Try magnifying the image in the browser to double size if you can’t see the difference. It’s subtle but annyoing. What can I do about it? Have you noticed?

If I turn off hardware acceleration it becomes good again.

The difference is about antialiasing I guess.

maybe by default it’s applying the css3 font-smoothing property, depended on the font size. so as u enlarge the font (or zoom in), the font gets smoother, i guess.

it’s good to see that they’ve added support for this at least. always wanted photoshop-like font anti-aliasing in browsers, but i guess it’s still very far from being close to that

designcise said
maybe by default it’s applying the css3 font-smoothing property, depended on the font size. so as u enlarge the font (or zoom in), the font gets smoother, i guess. it’s good to see that they’ve added support for this at least. always wanted photoshop-like font anti-aliasing in browsers, but i guess it’s still very far from being close to that

Chrome is rubbish anyway, there is much more quality issues, especially with font rendering.

I quite prefer the Firefox rendering actually. Also, this is nothing new.

Indeed, I have noticed this almost-blurry text. Annoying. And yes, I had to turn hardware acceleration as well.

crozer said
And yes, I had to turn hardware acceleration as well.

Why wouldn’t you turn on hardware acceleration though?

Zeplix said

crozer said
And yes, I had to turn hardware acceleration as well.

Why wouldn’t you turn on hardware acceleration though?

I’m sorry? I did not quite get you. I turned hardware acceleration off because, otherwise, Firefox 4.0.1 rendered fonts very blurry.

I’ve been very disappointed with FF4 so far (I installed and have used it since its first day of availability). On my Win 7 laptop (which admittedly is a bit dated), its performance is sluggish, especially with sites like Gmail, which randomly locks up my browser for 10-30 seconds.

Even on my main workstation, I’ve been less-than-thrilled with its performance (seems to be less stable than 3.6 to me). But the killer is its horrendous font-rendering. Disabling HW acceleration will fix this, but there is also an Add-on that may help fix the font-rendering issues without disabling HW acceleration:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/anti-aliasing-tuner/

There are no real instructions, and it’s a bit of guess-and-test, but this add-on can help in some situations.

IE9 renders the best fonts and i ain’t kidding.

duotive said
IE9 renders the best fonts and i ain’t kidding.

You might be right but I have stopped using IE over 11 years ago as my main browsing tool and I am not going to go back unless they will really do what they are saying. Bring a outstanding platform combining all the best aspects from leading browsers.