1386643 - Vibrancy in the titlebar plus tab title fade results in a strangely bold tab title

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Core :: Widget: Cocoa, defect, P1)

Description

[Mike Conley (:mconley) (:⚙️)]

Attachment: Bold title

This summary might not be 100% clear, but the attached screenshot might help.

Interestingly, this only seems to affect tabs that have titles long enough to fade on the right side.

I remember showing this to nhnt11 when we were fiddling with vibrancy in SF, and there was some macOS accessibility setting that seemed to affect this involving text smoothing, but I can't find the setting... nhnt11, do you remember what that setting was?

Comment 1

[Mike Conley (:mconley) (:⚙️)]

Attachment: Short, not-bolded title

Comment 2

[Mike Conley (:mconley) (:⚙️)]

Any idea what's happening here, mstange?

Comment 3

[Markus Stange [:mstange]]

Either something's wrong with the mask's PushGroupAndCopyBackground, or we're giving some intermediate surface the wrong FontSmoothingBackgroundColor, or something else is broken. I'll look into it.

Comment 4

[Markus Stange [:mstange]]

Attachment: Bug 1386643 - Don't respect font smoothing background colors in pushed layers.

This is an imperfect workaround. Ideally we'd want layout to determine the
correct color here: If the pushed layer will end up on something mostly opaque
in the outer layer, the font smoothing background color should be transparent
(or even a color that approximates that opaque content), and if the pushed
layer will end up on transparency in the outer layer, the appropriate font
smoothing background color for the outer layer should be used when drawing text
in the pushed layer.

This workaround causes us to lose subpixel AA in background tabs that have the
overflow mask applied to them. For those, using the font smoothing background
color in the pushed layer was the right choice.

Review commit: https://reviewboard.mozilla.org/r/164114/diff/#index_header
See other reviews: https://reviewboard.mozilla.org/r/164114/

Comment 5

[(inactive) Nihanth Subramanya [:nhnt11]]

(In reply to Mike Conley (:mconley) - Buried in needinfo / review backlog, eating my way out from comment #0)
> Created attachment 8892915 [details]
> Bold title
> 
> This summary might not be 100% clear, but the attached screenshot might help.
> 
> Interestingly, this only seems to affect tabs that have titles long enough
> to fade on the right side.
> 
> I remember showing this to nhnt11 when we were fiddling with vibrancy in SF,
> and there was some macOS accessibility setting that seemed to affect this
> involving text smoothing, but I can't find the setting... nhnt11, do you
> remember what that setting was?

That setting is "Use LCD font smoothing when available" in System Preferences' General pane.

Comment 7

[:Gijs (he/him)]

Cameron, is this what you were seeing earlier and mentioned on slack? :-)

Comment 9

[Jared Lockhart [:jlockhart]]

This also happens when you mouse over, and it seems to affect the URL bar too, here's a video:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/9eqba6tbigpde4t/tab%20font%20weirdness.mov?dl=0

Comment 11

[Cameron McCormack (:heycam)]

(In reply to :Gijs from comment #7)
> Cameron, is this what you were seeing earlier and mentioned on slack? :-)

It is indeed, thanks!

Comment 15

[Tracy Walker [:tracy]]

This seems to only happen in the default theme.  It doesn't happen with Light or Dark themes from customize options.  I switched to the Light theme several days ago to avoid the flickery/focusy issue on tab hover.

Comment 16

[Sören Hentzschel]

I wonder what this priority means. It's a visual regression in the default theme and it's a visual regression in one of the most important parts of the user interface of the browser: the tabs. And the flickering is *very* annoying. So this should be rather a P1 than a P4, no?

Comment 17

[Markus Stange [:mstange]]

I agree.

Comment 18

[Jeff Muizelaar [:jrmuizel]]

Comment on attachment 8893111 [details]
Bug 1386643 - Don't respect font smoothing background colors in pushed layers.

https://reviewboard.mozilla.org/r/164114/#review171724

Comment 19

[Pulsebot]

Pushed by [e-mail]:
https://hg.mozilla.org/integration/autoland/rev/b75150e59554
Don't respect font smoothing background colors in pushed layers. r=jrmuizel

Comment 21

[Wes Kocher (:KWierso) (Not reading bugmail; email directly if needed)]

https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/rev/b75150e59554

Comment 22

[Sören Hentzschel]

Attachment: bug

It's not fixed. I looks a bit different now, but the problem is still there.

Comment 24

[Albert Scheiner [:alberts]]

Attachment: macOS tab on hover font weight change

On macOS (10.11) it seems that the effect on the active tab and the URL bar has been fixed. Only the background tabs still show the font-weight change on hover.

Comment 25

[Markus Stange [:mstange]]

This bug was about the selected tab, which is no longer strangely bold.

The bug about bad text anti-aliasing when hovering background tabs needs a separate fix and will be tracked in bug 1389476.

Comment 26

[Sören Hentzschel]

(In reply to Markus Stange [:mstange] from comment #25)
> This bug was about the selected tab, which is no longer strangely bold.
> 
> The bug about bad text anti-aliasing when hovering background tabs needs a
> separate fix and will be tracked in bug 1389476.

well, this was not clear since I reported the issue already 10 days ago and my ticket was marked as duplicate of this ticket. Okay, I'll follow the other ticket. Thanks. ;)