1629948 - Font rendering result in a bit bolder and darker than what is comfortable

Status: UNCONFIRMED

(Core :: Graphics: Text, defect, P3)

Description

[Altiano]

Attachment: 1.jpg

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/80.0.3987.163 Safari/537.36

Steps to reproduce:

View a webpage on firefox desktop version

Actual results:

Rendered text is a bit bolder and darker.
Maybe this is subjective, but I feel like it is to many so should be treated important

Expected results:

Rendered font should be displayed as normal, not a little bit bolder or darker.

Comment 1

[Altiano]

Attachment: 2.jpg

Comment 2

[Altiano]

Attachment: 3.jpg

Comment 3

[Altiano]

On a personal note,
I just wish for it better, so that I can move to use Firefox as primary

Comment 4

[BugBot [:suhaib / :marco/ :calixte]]

Bugbug thinks this bug should belong to this component, but please revert this change in case of error.

Comment 5

[Bert Peers [:bpeers]]

I assume that Gfx draws what Layout requests, so any differences probably happen at a higher level? Please feel free to send it back if that's not true. Thanks.

Comment 6

[Jonathan Kew [:jfkthame]]

I'm going to send this back to Graphics, as I think it's really about the rasterization or compositing of the glyphs at the gfx level, rather than something that Layout is requesting. At first I assumed it would be a case of -webkit-font-smoothing:antialiased resulting in lighter-looking text in webkit/blink engines, but that doesn't appear to be the case in examples like Google search results.

The difference between Firefox and Safari (or Chrome) is pretty subtle, but it's there: I'll attach an image with side-by-side enlarged screenshots. The glyphs in Firefox look just a tiny bit heavier, as though a different kind of antialiasing has been used, or a different gamma, or something like that.

Note that if I apply -webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased in Safari, and -moz-osx-font-smoothing: grayscale in Firefox, both browsers give a noticeably lighter/thinner rendering, and (at first look, anyhow) they seem to match pretty closely. But without this, where I would in the past have expected to see subpixel rendering -- but now it seems to remain grayscale, but heavier -- there's a visible difference.

Comment 7

[Jonathan Kew [:jfkthame]]

Attachment: Firefox (left) vs Safari (right) rendering of Google search results, magnified

Comment 8

[Bert Peers [:bpeers]]

Thanks Jonathan for confirming that everything is in good order on the Layout side and providing some extra details!
I'll leave it with Lee as the triage owner to see what we can do next. Thanks.

Comment 9

[Firefox Bug Husbandry Bot]

Resetting severity to default of --.

Comment 10

[Firefox Bug Husbandry Bot]

Because this bug's Severity has not been changed from the default since it was filed, and it's Priority is P3 (Backlog,) indicating it has been triaged, the bug's Severity is being updated to S3 (normal.)