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Comment by dataflow | Hacker News Reader

> Never had problems with font rendering

Okay, so what's the logical conclusion here? That the person is lying?

The font rendering is very much off, some people just don't notice or don't care. Denying something others see with their own eyes doesn't help anybody.

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As a 15+ years Firefox user: What is "very much off" about Firefox' font rendering? For me it's the opposite, Chrome's rendering looks completely off to me - thin and it looks like the ClearType effect is set to 11. On the other hand, Firefox' font rendering in that screenshot looks like native Windows font rendering to me.

The problem with "very much off" for font rendering is that it is relative to what you are used to, not relative to any actual standard font rendering. If you've been using Firefox a while, Chrome will look off. If you've been using Chrome, Firefox will look off.

"off" implies an error. Which browser does it correctly? Having used Vivaldi and Firefox in close succession I never noticed a difference.

No, "off" in this case merely implies different from what you're used to.

This is aesthetic preference, there's no such thing as "correct". It goes back to the old debate on Mac vs. Windows font rendering -- do you like pixel alignment or do you like letterform accuracy? There's no right answer.

There's no right answer to that question, but Mac does render fonts too thin because of gamma issues, if I'm remembering right.

> No, "off" in this case merely implies different from what you're used to.

Kind of enough, but...

> This is aesthetic preference, there's no such thing as "correct".

"Correct" for the purposes of this discussion could be the normal OS rendering, and deviation from that is what would be "off"-ness.

Maybe I am reading too much into the sentence but to me, "some people just don't notice or don't care" implies that there is something objectively broken about it that can be quantified.

There is. I just posted a screenshot and explained it here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37231149

Yeah same. I vastly prefer Firefox’s rendering on windows, Mac, and Linux to chrome’s. In fact that was the main reason I switched many years ago.

Something about chrome DIY’ing font rendering instead of using the platform’s when I last looked into this

Even Edge font rendering started looking way better — only after they switched away from chrome’s diy font rendering.

(Aside: IMO chrome on android is good but all others are bad at font rendering. Probably uses platform rendering on Android)

I had a work companion that was using Chrome rendering the text in a really ugly way on Windows. We never discovered why it was doing that. It only got fixed when the sys admin updated to Windows 10.

> Firefox' font rendering in that screenshot looks like native Windows font rendering to me.

How?!

This is how example.com renders: https://i.imgur.com/MFo7ACg.png

Pay attention to how the word "illustrative" renders: https://i.imgur.com/lFJIEZG.png

See e.g. the boldness on e.g. the first "l"? Firefox's clearly has two very dark vertical strokes in adjacent pixels -- one black, one dark blue right next to it. Its rendering is substantially bolder than Windows's. I can understand if you personally prefer that, but how can you claim they look the same?!

I see exactly what you're talking about (quite noticable on the 'a' characters) and I wish somebody could explain why Firefox is rendering like that, and if it's a Windows platform specific issue.

Thanks. I've found it futile to argue with people about font rendering over the years. It's always like people are just in denial of reality. Which I feel is emblematic of how Firefox (and Linux, and lots of other libre software) lose desktop market share, IMO - by denying the reality everyone else sees.

As a Firefox user I had to open Chrome to check this to see if I had just been living with bad font rendering for the last 20 years.

Firefox uses my system defined default fonts (DejaVu Sans, DejaVu Serif, Hack) where Chrome completely ignores the system fonts.

IMO using the system defaults is the correct action here.

Anyway after manually configuring Chrome to use the system defaults they look identical to me:

Firefox: https://i.imgur.com/Zplpyiq.png

Chrome: https://i.imgur.com/YWkeZjh.png

So no, font rendering on FF seems fine to me...

Maybe I'm getting old and my eyes aren't seeing the differences but they look the same to me.

Chrome's font makes me want to squint. Probably I'm just used to FF.

Last time I tried it was impossible to get Chrome on linux to use the system font rendering settings. There's no way to tell Chrome to:

a) Don't hint/grid fit. b) Don't use cleartype color fringing.

That's reason enough to avoid Chrome for me. Compound that with Chrome's low quality image rescaling algorithms (and the absolute boneheadedness of their bug triaging, where any reports about it will invariably get filed under the wrong component and be closed before anyone who can actually understand the problem will look at it) and oh so many SVG rendering quality issues. I really hope Firefox can survive the current leadership and remain a strong alternative for decades more to come.

Are you using macOS, Windows or Linux? There are (mostly subtle) differences between these platforms which may expose more differences between fonts. I get it that it doesn't look different on your system, but I'm not discounting the possibility that the OS platform can also affect rendering.

I'm running Linux atm but I've used Firefox in Windows recently and the fonts were fine.

Chrome's font rendering is the outlier among browsers. The author of the article is seeing that difference and they want Firefox to look like Chrome.

I think the commentary is taking an issue with the suggestion that there's something "wrong" with Firefox's font rendering, when it's really Chrome who is the outlier.

Maybe we need a screenshot from Safari to compare and break the tie.

As of right now there's substantially more browsers that use Blink (and comprise over half of the market share) though so Firefox and Safari will always be outliers.

On macOS, it looks like Firefox uses native defaults. It’s very nearly identical to Chrome (same fonts, same weight, same spacing; Chrome might more aggressively aligning verticals to pixel boundaries, but that’s hard to tell on a Retina screen).

Safari for some reason is rendering everything at different sizes than Chrome or Firefox, I don’t know why.

You're splitting hairs, here, but fine: I'm referring to browser engines.

They aren't lying, the screenshots are clearly different, but it's strange to describe it as a problem with Firefox. It's a completely subjective difference, to me that Chrome screenshot looks blurry and faint compared to the Firefox one. It's also confusing that they say "fonts are smaller on Firefox" - in those two screenshots the Chrome font is clearly smaller.

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