Windows 7 upgrade led to loss off crispness & quality in browser text

Well, I decided to update my HP laptop from Windows Vista Home Premium to Windows 7 Ultimate (both 64 bit) and in doing so my firefox and IE browsers are considerably harder to read. Twitter, Facebook, Youtube descriptions, most anything has very poor quality.

I recently came across this problem on my desktop after updating my graphics card's driver via an optional windows update (big mistake) and all I had to do was rollback the driver. For this problem, I tried updating the graphics card's driver, but it's up to date.

I hope there's an easy fix for this, I really don't know what to do. Any ideas?

If your current font size is "normal - 100%", perhaps you might just try "medium - 125%" and see if this appeals more to you and your laptop.

Right-click on desktop, select "screen resolution", then select "make text and other items larger or smaller", and check the "medium - 125%" radio button.


Note that while this definitely will make all text characters larger and darker and appear like "they have MORE INK", it may also cause some windows drawn by application programs to potentially have truncated text or be otherwise slightly malformed. This is a long-standing issue that goes back even to WinXP (with its equivalent "small fonts (96DPI)" or "large fonts (120DPI)" settings.

If these very occasional types of minor cosmetic anomalies bother you, then I suppose "medium - 125%" is not for you. But if you can accept it, then the "MORE INK" darker, clearer, characters are definitely more readable.

Of course, you can also make things larger in both IE and Firefox with a "ZOOM - IN" (View -> Zoom) click, though you probably already knew that.

Just suggestions.

I actually tried increasing the size of the text to medium earlier, but that didn't affect the browser's text.

As for messing with the fonts of IE and mozilla, the font still appears to be very grainy and hard to read. Yesterday, when I had Vista, the font was perfect. Today, now that I have Windows 7, I'm seeing an obvious change. I doubt the font size has changed since the upgrade, so I feel as though something else is at work here.

WIN | type Adjust performance | ENTER key | Visual Effects tab |
Adjust for best appearance radio button | OK button

WIN is the key with the Microsoft flag on top.

Ctrl and Plus key can be used to increase size of display within your browser.

Ctrl and Minus key can be used to decrease size.

It looks like that has had an effect, but after playing with it, it still looks pretty bad. In Facebook, for example, although status updates are a little clearer, now names of people are a much fatter bold.

Just out of curiosity, can you provide the details of your laptop? Manufacturer and model please.

karlsnooks said:

WIN | type Adjust performance | ENTER key | Visual Effects tab |
Adjust for best appearance radio button | OK button

WIN is the key with the Microsoft flag on top.

Ctrl and Plus key can be used to increase size of display within your browser.

Ctrl and Minus key can be used to decrease size.

This had a small effect too. We're slowly chipping away at my problem!

Size of the text in the browser doesn't help its grainy-ness. It just looks as though certain letters are less dark than others. L in pilot is lighter than the rest of the letters. Its odd.

One more possibility, at least with Firefox.

You can fool around with the default font settings, to get things to look better. Note that this often is very dependent on graphics chip/card. I personally have seen much better looking characters displayed with ATI graphics products than with nVidia products.

Nevertheless, you can adjust things and try an alternative font... to see if it looks better or not. I even changed from serif to non-serif for a friend (who had a very inexpensive Compaq PC with basic nVidia graphics which looked awful using the normal default serif font, but was much improved using non-serif font).

Tools -> Options -> content tab



Then push the "advanced" button, and fool around with either font or point size, and see if you can improve how things look. Don't forget to also test printing, because this may also impact how web pages look when printed.