Possible to make fonts in FF4 look less horrible?

By Indoobidubly
in Web Browser Discussion & Support

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Wakers

Posted
Posted

The Firefox menu (on top) isn't using sub-pixel anti-aliasing, while the Chrome screenshot is.

No idea why that's happening for you, since the bug causing that was fixed back when it was still in a beta.

I guess they didn't fix it for everyone then.

I just upgraded minefield to 4.2 preview, and while the issue is different, there's still very ugly text, and what's worse, the poor font rendering has been applied to content and menus.

wBePz.png

Here is the same shot in the newest version of Minefield. Note how the font rendering is completely different, however you can still see hints of the same problems. Also, colouration of text is much more widespread, and while font rendering is much more readable, it still looks like it barely has cleartype or any kind of font smoothing enabled.

Interesting note here is that with this installation of minefield i made a competely new profile.

Explorer

apathy

Posted
Posted

The Firefox menu (on top) isn't using sub-pixel anti-aliasing, while the Chrome screenshot is.

No idea why that's happening for you, since the bug causing that was fixed back when it was still in a beta.

I too have the same bug then and it's completely unusable with HW Acc on. This is a fresh install, profile, etc.

Explorer

Pon

Posted
Posted

I'm in Windows 7 x64, just installed FF 4 portable to test it out and I have some font issues. I disabled directwrite, but I'm running ezgdi (which basically render fonts with freetype2 by hooking gdi calls) to get system-wide font smoothing. Anyhow, I have no problems with ezgdi and FF 3.6, but with FF 4 I'm noticing two problems:

1. Various UI elements have text with the top pixel cut off.

2. Some page tab titles have a post-rasterization greyscale effect applied to them (like the greyscale taskbar titles in Vista/7).

This screenshot shows the top pixel cut-off problem. Note the caps glyphs, like "CSS":

QfERP.png

Here is a zoom/crop of the above screenshot to illustrate the inconsistent greyscale application:

zrTlu.png

Here is the main menu, which looks fine, for reference (no top pixel cut-off, consistent and correct rendering):

wvddL.png

Anyone else experiencing these problems, even if you're not using ezgdi? Hopefully I won't have to stick with 3.6, because 4.0 is significantly faster.

Grand Master

Yusuf M. Veteran

Posted
  • Veteran
Posted

Here's how it looks for me:

199570439.png

And here's how it looks with DirectWrite disabled:

844298128.png

Use the ClearType Text Tuner (search "cleartype" in your start menu). It really makes a difference when you tweak it.

Rising Star

BilliShere

Posted
Posted

Well I installed the antialiasing extension mentioned earlier. and these are the settings that give me the best fonts. although i must say they still aren't as "crisp" as i'd like them to be (see the font in chrome). They are smoother though. but I wish I could keep the smoothness and yet retain the crispness.

zxVGo.png

Rising Star

Kaoxt

Posted
Posted

Well I installed the antialiasing extension mentioned earlier. and these are the settings that give me the best fonts. although i must say they still aren't as "crisp" as i'd like them to be (see the font in chrome). They are smoother though. but I wish I could keep the smoothness and yet retain the crispness.

zxVGo.png

Thanks Bill!

Collaborator

NightCrawler

Posted
Posted

I tried all the options and extensions... but for me it wasn't satisfying enough..

Then something occurred to me... if it's using hardware acceleration it must be using videocard drivers.. So I fired up the nVidia control panel, added Firefox to the 3D profile and started tweaking it..

Anisotropic filtering and anti-aliasing enhancement are the key settings so it seems just fiddle a bit with these..

It's not perfect but it looks pretty damn good.. Not sure if you can do the same with AMD cards though...

Mentor

Carbon Fiber

Posted
Posted

on firefox, enter in the address bar "about:config"

search for "gfx.font_rendering.directwrite.enabled"

double click on it to change the value to "false"

restart firefox

Your fist post in 6 year :blink:

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