[Nix-dev] firefox 21 font rendering

[Mathijs Kwik]

>From the screenshots, it's clear that firefox 21 uses subpixel rendering.
The 20 screenshot only has grayscale anti-aliasing.

To me, the 21 rendering (in your screenshots) looks much better,
sharper, clearer.
But there are times when subpixel rendering does not work out well.
- On a VGA output - because it lacks (sub)pixel-perfect targeting of
output pixels
- Some outputs don't have RGB subpixel order but BGR
- When rotating your display, the default RGB subpixel rendering
should change to V-RGB.
  xrandr and other tools do not always detect this correctly

There are ways to configure these, or to turn off subpixel rendering,
but I don't know the details.
Also, this is not firefox related I think. The old behavior (ff20) was
not to use the system libraries and thus not use the system-wide font
rendering config, but use an oldschool default, regardless of the rest
of the system.
The only thing that changed for ff21 is that it now does things the
same way as other applications.

Anyway, let's first try to find out why subpixel rendering doesn't
look good for you.
Please have a look at http://www.lagom.nl/lcd-test/img/subpixel.png to
find out the subpixel-order of your screen.




On Thu, Jun 20, 2013 at 1:53 PM, Petar Bogdanovic <petar at smokva.net> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> while the search box is working again in the latest pre-built firefox
> 21, font rendering changed too.  It's not ugly but it's not as good as
> whatever was there before.  See cropped screenshots:
>
>         http://smokva.net/ff/20.png
>         http://smokva.net/ff/21.png
>
> I'm not sure if the binary I'm using reflects the latest commit (the one
> making system-cairo optional) so it's possible that my build is out of
> date again.
>
> Thanks,
>
>                 Petar Bogdanovic
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