What's with font rendering in popular browsers?

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UCyborg
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What's with font rendering in popular browsers?

Unread post by UCyborg » 2023-02-20, 22:23

One thing I really like about Pale Moon is font rendering, at least on Windows I find it a big plus compared to popular browsers. It actually cares about altered ClearType settings I change via ClearType Tuner. I change them so fonts appear a bit darker/thicker, helps with readability.

I despise how they render in Chromium and Firefox stopped caring about those settings at some point. Chromium's font rendering actually hurts my eyes, Reddit is a good example of the website where the fonts not being full dark is very pronounced.

I've been messing around with Linux again in recent times, Manjaro, KUbuntu and most recently Debian, all with KDE desktop environment, I didn't change any font settings, just installed some basic Microsoft's fonts from the repos, fonts on the web and throughout system appear differently, I'd say it's overall more balanced than on Windows, even Chromium is OK. Though I guess it's possible I'm experiencing fall-backing to available fonts if some sites uses some other "fancy" fonts, didn't dig into details, probably most test their site only on Android and Windows. With "more balanced", I mean, I think that on Windows when they're rendered with GDI, contrast could be a bit better while contrast seems better with DirectWrite, but there's slight blur (fortunately for me, it doesn't hurt my eyes, though I'm aware some folks have problem with that).

On Windows in Chromium, Edge has an experimental flag to use ClearType settings, or you can use extension like Chrome Super Font Enhancer, which uses some formula to calculate contrast and apply it web pages via CSS property. But both options' results still don't strike me as quite right. I also tried GDIChromium once, a fork of Chromium with restored GDI rendering, which was removed sometime after support for Windows XP / Vista was dropped.

Fortunately, I don't "need" Edge or Firefox often as far as web compatibility goes, so can use browser where fonts come out best most of the time, exception being some weird fonts on some sites I encounter once in a blue moon, but since I'm not a regular visitor on those, I didn't spend much time worrying about those.

Anyway, Mozilla actually changed something with font rendering so it seems to behave like Pale Moon with version 109 on Windows, but that was quickly reverted in 109.0.1 because there was a backlash from its users...

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