151434 - "Quartz" font smoothing excessive

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(SeaMonkey :: General, defect)

Description

[G Piper]

From Bugzilla Helper:
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en-US; rv:1.1a) Gecko/20020610
BuildID:    2002061014

Overall, fonts seem just a bit too antialiased, causing a much too blurry look.
Light fonts on Dark backgrounds appear even worse, as it seems the antialiasing
is too apparent on the inside edge of the font. If the antialiasing was only on
the outer edge of the fonts, the colors and clarity of fonts on black
backgrounds would appear cleaner. Example: if you look at the fonts at
http://www.macpicks.com you can see that the actual color of the fonts seems
textured, due to the excessive antialiasing. The smoothness of the outside edge
of each font could be preserved, while eliminating the distortion of the actual
font color on the inside of the fonts. It may help sharpen black text on white
backgrounds too, without introducing "jaggies."

Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
1. View http://www.macpicks.com with the new 1.1 build.
2. "
3. "

Actual Results:  View is consistently blurry, even at 1152x870 resolution.
Viewing at lower resolutions only makes it worse, as the antialiasing gets bigger.

Expected Results:  See original description.
Unfortunately, the only work around at this point is to not use the Quartz
version. Ironically, the new Chimera browser has this same problem with the
smoothing.

Compare to non Quartz smoothed browsers for comparison. An effect somewhere
between Quartz smoothing and normal non-smoothing might be more beneficial.

Comment 1

[Greg K.]

This isn't a bug about Mozilla, it's feedback about Quartz Text that should be
communicated directly to Apple. Resolving Invalid.

Greg, remember that you can disable smoothing for small text sizes in OS X's
General preference pane.