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Hmm I use Firefox and the rendering I see in Firefox looks nothing like the render the author gets in Firefox; in fact the text rendering I get looks very similar to the "Chrome" rendering. Obviously this must depend on the libraries linked during the build process.

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The article is from 2019, things might also simply have changed since then.

Depending on your OS Firefox will select from multiple rendering backends based on your GPU, driver etc.

On Windows it may or may not be using DirectWrite for text rasterization as a general thing, and in some cases text might be rasterized using a different fallback path if DirectWrite can't handle the font, I think.

IIRC this was/is true for Chrome as well, where in some cases it software rasterizes text using Skia instead of calling through to the OS's font implementation.

IIRC, Chrome now uses CoreText/DirectWrite for system fonts on macOS/Windows, and Skrifa (FreeType rewritten in Rust) outlines rasterized with Skia for everything else (system fonts on Linux, web fonts on all platforms).

I believe Firefox leans on the system raserizers a little more heavily (using them for everything they support), and also still uses FreeType on Linux.

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