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by deadbunny 1032 days ago
As a Firefox user I had to open Chrome to check this to see if I had just been living with bad font rendering for the last 20 years.

Firefox uses my system defined default fonts (DejaVu Sans, DejaVu Serif, Hack) where Chrome completely ignores the system fonts.

IMO using the system defaults is the correct action here.

Anyway after manually configuring Chrome to use the system defaults they look identical to me:

Firefox: https://i.imgur.com/Zplpyiq.png

Chrome: https://i.imgur.com/YWkeZjh.png

So no, font rendering on FF seems fine to me...

Maybe I'm getting old and my eyes aren't seeing the differences but they look the same to me.
3 comments
maskros 1032 days ago
Last time I tried it was impossible to get Chrome on linux to use the system font rendering settings. There's no way to tell Chrome to:

a) Don't hint/grid fit. b) Don't use cleartype color fringing.

That's reason enough to avoid Chrome for me. Compound that with Chrome's low quality image rescaling algorithms (and the absolute boneheadedness of their bug triaging, where any reports about it will invariably get filed under the wrong component and be closed before anyone who can actually understand the problem will look at it) and oh so many SVG rendering quality issues. I really hope Firefox can survive the current leadership and remain a strong alternative for decades more to come.

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tcfunk 1032 days ago
Chrome's font makes me want to squint. Probably I'm just used to FF.
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retrocryptid 1032 days ago
Are you using macOS, Windows or Linux? There are (mostly subtle) differences between these platforms which may expose more differences between fonts. I get it that it doesn't look different on your system, but I'm not discounting the possibility that the OS platform can also affect rendering.
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deadbunny 1032 days ago
I'm running Linux atm but I've used Firefox in Windows recently and the fonts were fine.
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