[AndreyErmakov]

I didn't realize Chrome was becoming the default testing environment. I find it weird, given its terrible font rendering. I tried using Chrome but just couldn't. Smaller size fonts render weak, pale, bleak, like drawn with a dull pencil. I found it rather difficult to read large bodies of text in Chrome which was giving me quite a bit of eye strain. Not sure why anyone would want to test their pages in that in my opinion broken rendering engine.

I'm aware there is a setting which has to do with subpixel rendering or whatever this is called, I tried switching it on and off for no perceivable visual change. So I gave up on Chrome.

IE also has had broken font rendering since they moved to subpixel rendering several years ago, but at least it draws fonts in a strong and dark fashion making them more readable than in Chrome.

Personally, I design for Firefox which I consider the gold standard of web development. Then, at some intervals I check if things are okay in IE and Chrome and usually they are fine. Chrome was useful once in helping me spot some sort of a race condition, its developer tools also conveniently allow you to quickly bypass caching for testing purposes, but other than that I found it useless and unusable.

[rogerbinns]

I mainly use Chrome, with some testing in Firefox. It used to be the other way around, but Firefox's single threaded nature just makes it very painful when you have multiple windows with multiple tabs open. Having it use only 12% of the available CPU in the system when I am doing lots of work is not acceptable especially when I need the browser to be responsive.

Yes I know about e10s and servo, but they aren't in the regular Firefox right now, and especially weren't several years ago when I was forced to change from Firefox to Chrome. I'd love to go back ...

[ivank]

You're probably seeing this bug https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=146407... and it is indeed a sad story, especially because Chrome 21 worked just fine. Then they rewrote some gamma correction code in the Skia that shipped with Chrome 22.

[AndreyErmakov]

Thanks for the link. Based on some of the screenshots posted over there it indeed looks like what I've been observing on my machine (version 47-something).

Not a problem really. Never used Chrome before. Only installed it out of curiosity and also for testing purposes. Within the first day of using it on my development machine it became clear I wouldn't be using this piece of software in the future either.

[coldtea]

>I didn't realize Chrome was becoming the default testing environment. I find it weird, given its terrible font rendering. I tried using Chrome but just couldn't. Smaller size fonts render weak, pale, bleak, like drawn with a dull pencil.

I find the opposite: never could stand Firefox's font rendering -- and I've used the thing for years back in early 00s.

[ocdtrekkie]

I think it is in certain circles. For Google, obviously, in particular. Many of their new sites launch completely incompatible with Firefox and Edge. Some of the frameworks they push, like Polymer and Angular, have been repeat offenders in the past, which leads web apps built with them to also be broken.

[discordance]

Edge actually pretends it's Chrome in its UA

[ocdtrekkie]

To be clear, it still specifies "Edge" in it's UA string and can be specifically detected. And just about every browser now mentions Mozilla, Chrome, and Webkit in their UAs.