1675144 - On macOS, San Francisco fonts look slightly smaller/have more kerning with WebRender enabled

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 1675185

(Core :: Graphics: Text, defect)

Description

[lolrepeatlol]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.16; rv:84.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/84.0

Steps to reproduce:

I built Firefox with the 11.0 SDK.

Actual results:

The font kerning seems slightly larger (or the font size seems slightly smaller)

Expected results:

The font kerning should be the same as the kerning when built with the 10.11 SDK.

The fix for the Firefox UI font being incorrect when built with an SDK newer than 10.13 seen here seems to have caused some odd font size/kerning issues. The font size seems either slightly smaller or the kerning slightly bigger. The difference is subtle but noticeable.

Comment 1

[lolrepeatlol]

Attachment: As seen in the URL bar

Comment 2

[lolrepeatlol]

Attachment: Browser Toolbox comparison of URL bar

To ensure this wasn't just me seeing an actual change of font size in the UI, I checked to see that the actual font size was the same in the browser toolbox, and indeed it was. For the URL bar in particular, the font size was the same (1.25em).

Comment 3

[lolrepeatlol]

Attachment: Comparison of Brands text on Unsplash

The issue extends to websites that use San Francisco as well. On Unsplash, for example, one can see it in the "Brands" text.

Comment 4

[lolrepeatlol]

Of course, take this with a grain of salt because I'm on a Ryzen Hackintosh which has some graphical issues. I apologize if this issue does not happen on normal Macs.

Specs if it helps:

• CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 1700
• Motherboard: MSI B350 PC Mate
• 16GB RAM
• GPU: Gigabyte Radeon RX 5700 XT
• Software: OpenCore 0.6.2, macOS Big Sur 11.0.1 Beta (build 20B5012d, enrolled in Apple Public Beta Software Program), latest version of experimental AMD patches

Comment 5

[lolrepeatlol]

Attachment: Fonts look identical once WR is force disabled on FF w/ 11.0 SDK

Update: the issue does not occur when WebRender is disabled on Firefox built with the 11.0 SDK.

When WebRender is disabled, fonts look identical to Firefox built with the 10.11 SDK (from mozilla.org) with WebRender on or off.

Comment 6

[lolrepeatlol]

Well, it seems that I spoke too soon. After I updated my official Nightly (from mozilla.org), the issue appeared there too. It seems that this is not an SDK dependent thing. I should have tried building with the 10.11 SDK to see if this was an SDK-dependent thing before I filed a bug, oops. Sorry about that. I'll quickly update to the new Nightly build on Windows and see if the issue happens there as well, just in case, to see if this is macOS specific or not.

Comment 7

[lolrepeatlol]

On Windows, I looked at the URL bar (Segoe UI) to see if there were any differences, and there are none between Firefox Beta 83 and the latest build of Nightly 84 (both with WR enabled). I also checked apple.com to see if this was a San Francisco thing even on Windows, and there are no differences between Firefox Beta 83 and the latest build of Nightly 84. Therefore, I believe this is a macOS-specific bug.

Comment 8

[Jonathan Kew [:jfkthame]]

It looks like this is a result of bug 1672842; more specifically, it must be the webrender patch there (as the issue only shows up when WR is used).

If you revert the webrender patch from that bug (https://phabricator.services.mozilla.com/D95750), and instead apply the alternative version that was abandoned (https://phabricator.services.mozilla.com/D95454), does that make any difference to the result?

Comment 9

[Jonathan Kew [:jfkthame]]

Markus is looking into this in bug 1675185 already...

Comment 10

[lolrepeatlol]

(In reply to Jonathan Kew (:jfkthame) from comment #8)

It looks like this is a result of bug 1672842; more specifically, it must be the webrender patch there (as the issue only shows up when WR is used).

If you revert the webrender patch from that bug (https://phabricator.services.mozilla.com/D95750), and instead apply the alternative version that was abandoned (https://phabricator.services.mozilla.com/D95454), does that make any difference to the result?

Replied in bug 1675185 :)