[alternatetwo]

Chromium can't render fonts at all after they got rid of GDI rendering. Just compare Verdana 12pt in Word/LibreOffice and Chrome, they're not seriously trying to tell me that's the correct font? The letters don't even look the same.

Left is Firefox with GDI, right is Chrome: https://i.redd.it/0fk50cgcexie1.png

[dist-epoch]

Firefox does not use GDI, it used DirectWrite which is GPU accelerated.

[kevingadd]

Historically Firefox did have a GDI fallback for certain fonts specifically to address this user complaint, in order to make them look "right". I don't know when/if it was removed.

The pref name is 'gfx.font_rendering.cleartype_params.force_gdi_classic_for_families'. I believe it may have just enabled a GDI compatibility mode for DirectWrite, but I'm not sure if that uses the GDI rasterizer under the hood or not.

[alternatetwo]

It most certainly uses GDI for Verdana. Firefox tried to disable that by overwriting the previous default setting for gfx.font_rendering.cleartype_params.force_gdi_classic_for_families and gfx.font_rendering.cleartype_params.force_gdi_classic_max_size, but restoring them fixed that.

Also this is not important. What's important is that DirectWrite does not render this font correctly, if you compare it with LibreOffice or Word.

[e4m2]

It just uses GDI_CLASSIC for DWRITE_MEASURING_MODE [1] and DWRITE_RENDERING_MODE [2] in that case. No actual GDI in sight.

[1] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/api/dcommon/...

[2] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/api/dwrite/n...