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Comment by ciupicri | Hacker News Reader

Off-topic, does anyone have any idea why the text looks so horrible on Firefox running on Linux? I'm using firefox-35.0.1-3.fc20.x86_64. I've also tried midori-0.5.9-2.fc20.x86_64 and it's the same. Only google-chrome-stable-40.0.2214.94-1.x86_64 renders it in a readable way.

P.S. Screenshot: http://imgur.com/m4rLSHQ

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The chosen font has strokes thinner than 1px at the chosen size. Every rendering engine has its own way of handling this kind of broken design, your engine uses subpixels to show accurate stroke width, therefore the weird colors.

[Edit:] Those ultra-light fonts are a very unfortunate fad that probably began with the introduction of iOS 7, maybe even earlier with MS's Metro, contrived and perpetuated by people who don't read but who look at texts.

That's what it looks like for me too. Contrast is so low that it's essentially unreadable for me. It is very pretty though. Elegant.

On Firefox, Alt-V Y N (for no style) is in muscle memory by now, and renders in glorious 1990s black and white, and the text flows within the browser borders (another problem on many sites today).

Sorry - I just picked a theme and never thought to browser check. Weirdly, I run FF on Linux and it looks okay. Anyway, I'll try to tweak the font. Thanks for pointing it out.

Not an expert at all in any sorts of font issues, but I remember having something similar with unfortunate settings of font `Hinting` and `Antialiasing`.

My current settings are: Medium and Grayscale respectively. (on Gnome Shell)

Indeed, it looks more readable with anti-aliasing disabled: http://imgur.com/Zze1yAm

Looks fine on Firefox on Linux to me, maybe you've zoomed the page by accident? Try ctrl-0 to see if that fixes it.

Nope, it's the same.

They don't look too bad on the same Firefox on Ubuntu 14.04:

http://imgur.com/6nKzwZq

What Linux are you running? "fc20" I guess that's Fedora? So it looks bad on Firefox on Fedora but fine on Ubuntu. That's a Fedora issue not a Firefox or general Linux issue.

Yes, fc20 stands for Fedora 20. The difference between it and Ubuntu isn't that big if I zoom in: http://imgur.com/ptlQEmf

Based on the other comments I got, the small differences could be caused by different anti-aliasing settings or font engines (I'm currently using freetype-freeworld-2.5.0.1-5 for example).

I see, well as a test you could download the Ubuntu fonts and switch to them for comparison.

PS I agree too, they look better in Chrome, don't know why.

Looks fine on Iceweasel on Debian and no JavaScript.

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