1336052 - fonts badly readable since 51

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(Thunderbird :: Theme, defect)

Description

[Hans Hamakers]

Attachment: tb50vs52.jpg

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; rv:46.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/51.0
Build ID: 20170125094131

Steps to reproduce:

installed 51 and 52 


Actual results:

fonts are badly readable since the upgrade from 50 to 51
see attached screendump

Comment 1

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Hans, please paste the graphics section of Thunderbird | help | troubleshooting

Comment 2

[Hans Hamakers]

Graphics
GPU #1
Description	NVIDIA NVS 4200M
Vendor ID	0x10de
Device ID	0x1057
RAM	Unknown
Drivers	nv4_disp
Driver Version	6.14.13.900
Driver Date	10-28-2013
Features
WebGL Renderer	Google Inc. -- ANGLE (NVIDIA NVS 4200M Direct3D9 vs_3_0 ps_3_0) -- OpenGL ES 2.0 (ANGLE 2.1.0.2a250c8a0e15)
AzureCanvasBackend	skia
AzureCanvasAccelerated	0
AzureFallbackCanvasBackend	cairo
AzureContentBackend	skia

Comment 3

[Jorg K (CEST = GMT+2)]

This is a know side effect of bug 1007702 and bug 1299903. Basically you don't like the new Skia font renderer, which is used when HWA is switched off. Neither do I.

To change back to cairo, either switch HWA (hardware acceleration) on
  Tools > Options > Advanced, General

or with HWA switched off set preference
  gfx.content.azure.backends
to
  direct2d1.1,cairo (default is direct2d1.1,skia,cairo).

The new default behaviour using skia is pretty much like Google Chrome.

Check attachment 8786999 [details], left (good) without skia, right (bad) with skia.