Mozilla launches Firefox 4

smorrissey said:

Guys for those having blurry issues under win 7 is essential that you unselect this option:



Control panel -> system and security -> system -> advanced configuration

That disables CT/Aliasing. Which is not what I want to do. It works perfect everywhere except in FF4 with HW acceleration on. Much simpler to simply turn off HW acceleration.

DaGooN said:

this is Zoom reset.
on/off

Thanks for humoring me. Did you restart FF after changing your settings. Those are both the same as my HW off setting. Yet your zoomed ones both look more like my HW on settings (though with fonts zoomed the difference is very subtle).

DaGooN said:

what i did was go to the page then took a screen cap and saved the first picture. then turn H/A off closed ff4, reopen and go back to do the same with H/A off.

might be Paint since its all i have. PrintScreen, Crop ect

not sure if this is any help as its talking about the beta.but.

Also note, Microsoft has released a new update, KB2454826. In this update, according to the KB article, D2d1.dll, Fntcache.dll, Dwrite.dll, D3d10_1.dll and D3d10_1core.dll is updated to version which solves font related graphics issues in rendering. Windows 7 users might want to test this update for better font performance. # Fix Firefox 4 Font Problem in Smoothing, Blurry Rendering in FF 4 Beta

Disabling Direct2d is essentially the same thing as disabling HW in FF. Have you done this? That would explain why you see no effect from HW off/on.

EDIT: Actually that about:config setting gets override from HW off/on anyway. That was just probably the way to do it before there was an actual setting.

As far as the windows update, my system is fully patched. I had already found a link to that update earlier and when I tried to apply it, it indicated it was already installed.

Anyway bizzare. Some of our computers have a very obvious affect from HW accel on fonts and some don't. It certainly isn't updates as I updated everything.

HW accel off for now...

Curious. Is your direct2d working?
HTML5 Speed Reading

I get 8 fps with HW off.
I get 60 fps with HW on.

I haven't found a test for DirectWrite (the real culprit, but when disable direct2d, directwrite is disabled).

Here are my snips of this very site with hardware acceleration on/off. Now that I am typing the post, I see more difference in the font that appears in the message windows than in the actual snips. This makes me think that it also depends on the font - some fonts are more affected than others, but so far I certainly like it more without the hardware acceleration. And to be honest, I don't see why do I need it in my daily browsing anyway, it's not like rendering any typical site is really a resource-intensive task.