Browser font rendering

[chumley]

On Windows 7, I have noticed that font rendering in Pale Moon, FireFox, or IE 11 looks noticeably better than in Chrome or other Chrome-based browsers. In the former browsers the fonts look bolder/sharper/clearer than in Chrome-based browsers.

Does anyone know why this is? I did some googling and couldn't really find an answer.

Here's some related discussion, just confirming that I'm not alone:
https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/commen ... rendering/

This add-on for Chrome makes it more tolerable, but still not as good as PM/FF.
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/deta ... njdelkiock

[eskaton]

Probably this (removing DirectWrite): http://www.ghacks.net/2016/06/06/chrome ... ng-google/

[Moonchild]

Eskaton: I'm afraid you have it backwards.

Chrome uses DirectWrite exclusively for rendering fonts, even at small sizes where the font-shaping of it creates often anemic, too-light or poorly-antialiased fonts.
You can emulate it in Pale Moon by setting gfx.font_rendering.cleartype_params.force_gdi_classic_max_size to a very small size on a hardware-accelerated setup. Of note, Pale Moon uses GDI for larger fonts than Firefox to work around some edge cases, improving font clarity at the expense of some (potential) speed.

[chumley]

Thanks Moonchild.

[zcyzcy88]

IIRC,
Because DirectWrite works best with Direct2D (used by IE & FF),
Chrome use Skia.