Will they ever fix font rendering in firefox 4?

[squall_leonhart]

hakubo's shots appear unaffected by the blur,

another issue is comparing the screenshots in imageshacks viewer, particularly if you use a default zoom.

the main problem i expect people are seeing is there is no colour bleed in the directwrite fonts which causes GDI / Cleartype fonts to appear darker.

[Rodze]

Comparing JPEG images is also an issue.

Hakubo's shot is a clear DW rendering. The day I can't tell apart which is which easily is the day I'll tell you there's no issue anymore.

[Soulburner]

What I see on the screenshots and on my own computer does not differ from the screenshots posted here:
http://www.basschouten.com/blog1.php/20 ... irectwrite
(scroll down a bit to see the Firefox interface comparison).

[phuzi0n]

Comparing JPEG images is also an issue.

Hakubo's shot is a clear DW rendering. The day I can't tell apart which is which easily is the day I'll tell you there's no issue anymore.

Yes squall_leonhart needs to learn how to crop and save as lossless PNG but the JPEG's were still reasonable quality (my image editor says it was saved at 99% quality) that the minor loss shouldn't be much of an issue.

Indeed, the W's in Hakubo's shot are a dead giveaway that it's DW.

[squall_leonhart]

Yes squall_leonhart needs to learn how to crop and save as lossless PNG

I really don't. the screenshot was taken in a way that demonstrates as much text as possible, and jpg2k @ 100% was used, which is practically png quality (comparatively speaking).

There is nothing wrong with the W in Hakubo's shot. You are all so used to the incorrect rendering of GDI+Cleartype that it appears wrong to you.

Try reading more books. You'll get used to the fonts being rendered as intended.

[zviratko]

All fonts in FF4b8 are insanely blurry, I'm not able to look at it without my head hurting and I literally feel the strain my eyes are under. All screenshots of FF4 here exhibit this issue and I can't understand how anybody can claim it's allright.
Maybe you sit 10cm from the screen or maybe your 24" screen is set to 1024x768, I can understand not seeing it _then_...

Sorry If I'm sounding harsh, but everybody not seeing the problems with font rendering should have their eyesight checked! I registered here just because of this. I tried FF4 a few times and just couldn't bear it. It's the _ONLY_ application that renders fonts so crappy. MS's fault or not, it doesn't really matter - I'm a user and I'm not going to use something that makes my eyes bleed!

After I post this, I'm gonna close and uninstall FF4 once again, hoping that one day I could actually use it.

Oh and btw, cool rocket, a time well wasted (yeah, irony).

[Doomsday]

@zviratko: Just do what I do. Go to about:config, set gfx.direct2d.disabled to true, and enjoy gdi fonts again with the added benefits of getting harware acceleration with Direct3D 9.

[WonderCsabo]

@zviratko: Just do what I do. Go to about:config, set gfx.direct2d.disabled to true, and enjoy gdi fonts again with the added benefits of getting harware acceleration with Direct3D 9.

Layers acceleration gives very much less speed than D2D.

[phuzi0n]

There is nothing wrong with the W in Hakubo's shot. You are all so used to the incorrect rendering of GDI+Cleartype that it appears wrong to you.

If you haven't been paying attention, I already explained earlier that W's using the same font, size, etc. on the same page with DW enabled can look drastically different. The middle slants get very faint and look horrendous. Here's a comparison of the a W in my shot of DW enabled on top vs the W's in Hakubo's shot on bottom.








It seems that we have different font sizes (different DPI?) so it's not the greatest comparison but even though his text is bigger the middle slants are still much more faint than in my shot. I've looked for better examples where the W's are rendered differently in the same body of text which I've seen before, but I haven't found any again. The next best thing I could find is editting this post. The W in the subject looks fine but all of the ones in the block text box are horribly faint. The further away I am the more it starts to look like \ / even while the rest of the text is still legible.

[hakubo]

It seems that we have different font sizes (different DPI?) so it's not the greatest comparison but even though his text is bigger the middle slants are still much more faint than in my shot.

Just font size - I've set minimum to 13.

Here's how it looks to me with default size:


Looks pretty much the same as your shot, so the font size makes the difference.

Another thing I've noticed is the lowercase w's with the default font size - the slanted lines look more "blurry" (sigh) on some than the others. On your screenshot the bottom one looks sharper than the top one:


I wonder if anything could be done about that.

[mds67]

Do you expect that general users will customize size font's so it can use FF4?

The first thing they do is uninstalling and using another browser.

[NVD]

Nothing anyone can do until MS fixes their DirectWrite bugs, Mozilla is just an API user and consumer. MS didn't dogfood D2D and DW properly before releasing the APIs and it has come back to haunt them now.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eating_your_own_dog_food

http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/guides ... ucks.ars/4

Sometimes, however, the problems aren't noticed until much later. Direct2D is an example of this. Direct2D is a good concept. It provides high-performance 2D graphics that can exploit far more of the power of modern video cards than the old GDI API. It was introduced with Windows 7, and is available as an add-on for Windows Vista. Unfortunately, at the time Windows 7 was released, there was virtually no software that used Direct2D. Not surprising in a way, as it was brand spanking new, but it caused a problem: once Redmond did try to use Direct2D, for Internet Explorer 9, their developers found that it didn't actually work properly.

[orizng]

Nothing anyone can do until MS fixes their DirectWrite bug.

Mozilla can disable the hardware acceleration for selected users now. and re-enable it when MS fix the bugs.

[Wii Master 64]

Honestly, I've gotten used to the horrible font renderings. And if anyone asks, my eye-sight's fine, it's still 20/20, and I've been using these betas since they came out.

[phuzi0n]

Do you expect that general users will customize size font's so it can use FF4?

The first thing they do is uninstalling and using another browser.

Nobody was suggesting that at all. We were just talking about how Hakubo's shot was very clearly using DW because the W's in his shot are horrendous which can happen on any small font size.