Firefox 4 vs Chrome font rendering

FutureSight said

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.

I never used IE as a mail browser tool. And eleven years ago i did not know what the internet was

I did a bit of reading around and I found out it’s the GDI Natural mode, which is forced when HWA is on in FF4 . However they enabled an about:config setting in Firefox 6 to add a custom setting that allows you to set to whole pixel rendering method instead of the natural, while keeping HWA on.

My theory is that it wouldn’t look this blurry if you had windows level cleartype off. I guess this way 2 passes of font smoothing is applied, once the GDI natural, and second the windows’ cleartype. I don’t want to try that because I don’t like messing with cleartype settings of Win7.

I’m not a fan of FF6 , the Nightly build.. I like FF4 . I was using FF 3 .0.16 or something like that, on of the first versions from the 3 line. I had many many customized addons and a great skin. I took a big leap and set up FF4 from ground zero. Found a good skin to replace the old one as well. Now I have to use 3 addons instead of 1 for the same functionality. And some features are missing but I’m waiting for my new mouse that has more buttons so it’ll enable more freedom control-wise. It doesn’t really matter because finally this doesn’t crash and seems faster. I don’t know about HWA or where would it help, but I’m fine with that turned off.

To be honest, I have always supported FireFox as you can’t imagine. Always speaking good of it, using it as my main browser everywhere and recommending its usage.

However, as time passed by, the worst issue appeared: Helvetica-fonts render out like hieroglyphs. I lived with it for a long time, and I was about to jump into Chrome as it was faster, lighter and did not present any of these huge (yet ignored) issues.

But I didn’t, I kept using FireFox and I don’t know why. And now what? FF4 comes in, Helvetica issue is fixed but wait, now every time I start FF4 and open eg. 3 tabs, it freezes for 5-15 seconds; and no, I have very powerful computer. And to glorify this freezing bug, fonts look blurry.

I guess it’s now time for me to jump into Chrome.
Sorry for the long story, but I had to take it out of my chest

Chris

I’m a die-hard firefox supporter, been using it as my main browser since I dumped IE7 when I was 13 years old.

They have fixed the font-rendering in Firefox 5 (beta) which I am using to type this.

I used to be a hard core fan of FireFox as well and was a bit doubtful of this “chrome revolution”. But I just got to say. FF got nothing on Chrome. Fast, Light, Clean and most importantly stable. Im in Love =)

paulpullen said
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.

FF4 is a catastrophe, i agree

LOOK AT THE RAM USAGE ! :surprised:

Stability sucks ! Randomly stops responding.

Hate it.