Blurry text in IE9 and/or Firefox 4?? READ THIS

borat said:

and since you can combine them, either your 4 options by them selves, or
2+3
2+4
2+3+4
3+4..
8 possible ways? probably missed some or added to many, im tired..

I don't really see that. It looks more like it switches in unpredictable ways to me.

I have CT on. If I turn it off, some fonts/applications go to #1 (NO AA at all), some to #3) old style smoothing.

At least until we get to #4, where it does all kinds of unpredictable mix and match.

It really seems like a complete mess to me and not just in web browsers. I expect MS will be forcing DirectWrite fonts in more applications and it will likely be the default choice in Win8.

I am reverting back to 3.6 as well. Even with gfx.direct2d.disabled set to True, there are still situations where the page content text is screwed up (completely ill-rendered font). In addition to reversed urlbar text being unreadable. Also it's quite annyoing that there is no page title visible any more, the truncated version on a tab is not enough, I need to see the whole title.

Please someone let others know if FF4 gets the font rendering issue fixed. I'll follow this thread for that information..

I'm switching back to 3.6 as well. I have spent way too much time with the AA Tuner. It shouldn't be this complicated to get text to look remotely presentable.

FliGi7 said:

I'm switching back to 3.6 as well. I have spent way too much time with the AA Tuner. It shouldn't be this complicated to get text to look remotely presentable.

Just turn off HW acceleration and you are back to 3.6 fonts.

As with Borat, it's not that simple and doesn't just change it all back to proper rendering.

FliGi7 said:

As with Borat, it's not that simple and doesn't just change it all back to proper rendering.

That is a pretty obscure case with a quite minor effect.

From what I can see, this only affects people who disable CT and it is only affecting the reverse highlighting by failing to bold. It is not making the font more blurry. Look closely at the not reversed and reversed fonts. They are identical only in 3.6 it is bolded.

So it fails to bold under some obscure circumstance for CT-OFF folks. I guess if you are CT-OFF user and that is a big deal, of course you can go back to 3.6, but it seems extremely minor to me.

HW-OFF, CT-ON (most people use CT I believe) renders the same when I tested, but it is possible I missed some obscure case. Borat?

Well, for me the experience is much different. I had HW-OFF, CT-ON and the result was: content text is mostly ok, except at some random cases, the rendering completely fails: very thin font and very strong color fringing. Moving the page up down (mouse wheel for example) may switch from broken to normal at that situation. And the reverse highlight was not a thin version of the font but rather a very much color fringing failed rendition. This was just my experience (before I switched back to 3.6, ahh what a relief).

That is kind of hard to prove/disprove if you say it was happening randomly.

I exclusively use CT-ON, HW-OFF except when testing something for this thread and haven't notice anything out of the ordinary with font rendering.

I do get just as good a font display in FF 4 with HA off as I do in FF 3.6x (all with system wide smoothing set to standard) but at that point, with HA effectively useless, I just prefer FF 3.6... up to the point that FF4 is notably more secure but is it really? After an update or 2 to FF4 I'll probably commit to it.