433659 - linux firefox 3.0 ignores desktop anti-aliasing settings; forces anti-aliased fonts

Status: UNCONFIRMED

(Firefox :: Shell Integration, defect)

Description

[Forest]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9b5) Gecko/2008050509 Firefox/3.0b5
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9b5) Gecko/2008050509 Firefox/3.0b5

After upgrading to firefox 3.0b5 on linux, I am unhappy to find that firefox no longer obeys my desktop preferences regarding font rendering.  I specifically disabled anti-aliasing in xfce, yet firefox anti-aliases fonts anyway.  I have found no way to turn off this misfeature.  

I accept that some folks are in love with anti-aliasing, but it causes me eye strain, making firefox unsuitable for me.


Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Disable anti-aliasing in your desktop settings.  (In xfce, it's in the "user interface" section of the settings manager.)
2. Observe all window decorations, panels, and gtk/gnome applications  respect the setting, rendering fonts without anti-aliasing.
3. Start firefox, and load a page with some plain black-on-white text.
Actual Results:  
Firefox renders anti-aliased text, despite the desktop setting.  It sticks out like a sore thumb among the other apps on the desktop.  In other words, firefox is a poorly behaved gtk app.


Expected Results:  
Firefox should have respected the desktop anti-aliasing settings, just like all well-behaved gtk apps.


Failing respect for the user's desktop settings, firefox should at the very least provide its own (easy) way to disable anti-aliasing.

Comment 1

[Sylvain Pasche]

Firefox renders fonts through Cairo/Pango which read font options from the Xrm database and Fontconfig configuration.

What's the output of the command "xrdb -q|grep Xft"?
And what does "fc-match -v 'Sans 10'|grep antialias" return?

Comment 2

[Forest]

$ xrdb -q
*customization:	-color

$ fc-match -v 'Sans 10'|grep antialias
	antialias: FcTrue(w)

Comment 3

[Sylvain Pasche]

(In reply to comment #2)
> $ xrdb -q
> *customization: -color

So you don't have any line starting with Xft in the output of the "xrdb -q" command?

In order to have the antialiasing disabled in Firefox, you need to have a Xft.antialias entry set to 0 in the Xrm database. You can do this manually by typing the command:

echo "Xft.antialias: 0" | xrdb -merge

And then restart Firefox.

In the Gnome desktop, a daemon called gnome-session ensures that the Xrm configuration (the Xft... lines in the xrdb -q command) are kept up to date with the font configuration. I guess there should be an equivalent daemon in the xfce desktop.

Otherwise, you could add these commands in your session initialization script.

Comment 4

[Forest]

Hmm... I'll look in to it, but it still seems to me that something is amiss in firefox, since all of my other gtk apps are respecting my anti-alias setting.

Comment 5

[Sylvain Pasche]

I agree that it would be more coherent from a user point of view that Firefox uses the same font settings as the other Gtk applications.

In fact Firefox reads settings from the Xrm database (via cairo), while Gtk uses Xsettings.

This is not an issue for Gnome users, because the gnome-session daemon ensures both Xrm and Xsettings are in sync. But when you have no such daemon, this can be an issue.