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

borat · 30 Mar 2011

check the picture you atteched with ascii art, the vertical lines to the right on the cameras are'nt vertical, if you turn off hardware acceleration, they are displayed correctly, vertical.

if either hardware acceleration or cleartype is turned on, fonts get incorrect width.
when ever cleartype is turned on, all fonts get incorrect width and get blurred.
if only hardware acceleration is turned on, fonts get incorrect width and bold fonts get blurred.

Snowdog · 30 Mar 2011

Ok. I see it now. MS font systems do seem like they are in beta.

It is kind of amusing that while initially MS went for better looking screen fonts designed for LCD and a system to tune better appearance for LCD (cleartype) and Apple went more for "Typographic Purity", but blurrier looking on screen. Now MS seems to be following Apple with its new system and seems intent on forcing it on us.

I actually like tuned Cleartype fonts. They look clean and sharp to me and since I tuned them, they are ideal for my screen. The only way to get Cleartype fonts in Firefox 4 is to disable Hardware Acceleration. I guess the same applies for Non AA/CT fonts if you want them everywhere.

So I guess most of us will simply turn off HW Accel.

Armin Tamzarian · 30 Mar 2011

@borat. Interesting indeed. The differences between your screen grabs of the search drop down resembles the general differences I see on my system between setting font smoothing to Standard or Clear Type, regardless of the Firefox hardware acceleration setting. Attached is an example (from nytimes.com) of the difference between Firefox HA on and off (with font smoothing for the system set to Standard). Setting system font smoothing to Clear Type seems to split the difference, in which case the big fonts look better but everything else has that ol’ clear type haze. What a jumble, but listening in on y'all has helped me out.
Also, in more Ascii art testing I got the exact same results with the ascii picture of the camera.

borat · 03 Apr 2011

ive moved back to 3.6..
fonts are too messed up in 4 for me..

hardware acceleration and cleartype off makes the text in the addressbar not readable when its selected, and other text like on the orange firefox button arent readable, and on some sites the text still get messed up..
like on https://www.flashback.org/
the top menu bar, looks fine, but on hover, it get messed up

yowanvista · 03 Apr 2011

borat said:

ive moved back to 3.6..
fonts are too messed up in 4 for me..

hardware acceleration and cleartype off makes the text in the addressbar not readable when its selected, and other text like on the orange firefox button arent readable, and on some sites the text still get messed up..
like on https://www.flashback.org/
the top menu bar, looks fine, but on hover, it get messed up

Update your display drivers, the site above displays fine for me with no blur or any other visual problems. I think this issue is machine specific since Hardware Acceleration depends on the GPU :)

In fact I never ever got any such issues with FF4

borat · 03 Apr 2011

yowanvista said:

borat said:

ive moved back to 3.6..
fonts are too messed up in 4 for me..

hardware acceleration and cleartype off makes the text in the addressbar not readable when its selected, and other text like on the orange firefox button arent readable, and on some sites the text still get messed up..
like on https://www.flashback.org/
the top menu bar, looks fine, but on hover, it get messed up

Update your display drivers, the site above displays fine for me with no blur or any other visual problems. I think this issue is machine specific since Hardware Acceleration depends on the GPU :)

In fact I never ever got any such issues with FF4

have you tryed the ascii page i showed earlier with hardware acceleration and cleartype on and off, and you see no difference??

ive got the latest nvidia drivers

check the pictures, hardware acceleration and cleartype off, when the adressbartext is selected the it looks bad, and the hovermenutext change to bad, even the selected "sport" change, and the firefox button-text look bad as well, with hardware acceleration on, it change the dimensions of the fonts so the whole site change, like i showed in my last post..
width, and maybe height as well, of the fonts change, and get blurred or just look bad

view the images in full size in different tabs to compare
edit: added a 3.6 screenshot, no issues there

yowanvista · 04 Apr 2011

borat said:

yowanvista said:

borat said:

ive moved back to 3.6..
fonts are too messed up in 4 for me..

hardware acceleration and cleartype off makes the text in the addressbar not readable when its selected, and other text like on the orange firefox button arent readable, and on some sites the text still get messed up..
like on https://www.flashback.org/
the top menu bar, looks fine, but on hover, it get messed up

Update your display drivers, the site above displays fine for me with no blur or any other visual problems. I think this issue is machine specific since Hardware Acceleration depends on the GPU :)

In fact I never ever got any such issues with FF4

have you tryed the ascii page i showed earlier with hardware acceleration and cleartype on and off, and you see no difference??

ive got the latest nvidia drivers

check the pictures, hardware acceleration and cleartype off, when the adressbartext is selected the it looks bad, and the hovermenutext change to bad, even the selected "sport" change, and the firefox button-text look bad as well, with hardware acceleration on, it change the dimensions of the fonts so the whole site change, like i showed in my last post..
width, and maybe height as well, of the fonts change, and get blurred or just look bad

view the images in full size in different tabs to compare
edit: added a 3.6 screenshot, no issues there

This is weird, I don't see all that blurry text in my FF4 :)

Snowdog · 04 Apr 2011

yowanvista said:

This is weird, I don't see all that blurry text in my FF4

Make sure you are clicking his images again after you load them, because when you first load his full size ones, they are still aren't 100% so everything looks blurry.

Also instead of arguing the subjective about what you see as sharp, provide your own sample, because opinions vary about what people consider sharp.

There are 4 potential display font outputs on Win7(what a mess):

1) True unaliased fonts, with no smoothing/CT/AA at all.
2) Cleartype fonts
3) Traditional Windows Smoothed fonts (but not cleartype)
4) New DirectWrite HW accelerated smoothed fonts.

People can have a subjective preference for any of the above, but they are essentially descending order of sharpness. 1) being sharpest, 4) being softest.

This is by design. If your HW accelerated fonts don't appear soft, you don't have HW accelerated fonts, and the problem is in your drivers, not the drivers of the people who do.

Armin Tamzarian · 04 Apr 2011

I'm with borat - back to Firefox 3.6x.

borat · 04 Apr 2011

Snowdog said:

There are 4 potential display font outputs on Win7(what a mess):

1) True unaliased fonts, with no smoothing/CT/AA at all.
2) Cleartype fonts
3) Traditional Windows Smoothed fonts (but not cleartype)
4) New DirectWrite HW accelerated smoothed fonts.

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..