370754 - Font Randomly becomes bold (heavier weight) for parts of lines

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 300982

(Firefox :: General, defect)

Description

[Peter Gerdes]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en-US; rv:1.8.1.1) Gecko/20061204 Firefox/2.0.0.1
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en-US; rv:1.8.1.1) Gecko/20061204 Firefox/2.0.0.1

Randomly firefox will decide to render fonts on the right side of the screen as bolder than those on the left even though they are part of the same line. In other words as you scan a line of text from left to right at some jagged boundary the font starts looking bold.

This error crops up not too infrequently but will often be fixed by reloading the page and is associated with no particular site (has happened on many but I haven't noticed anything similar amoung them).

I am running the OS X 10.4.8 my default font is Times at size 14.  Proportional:Serif, Serif:Times, Sans-Seriff:Helvetica all at size 14. Monospace:Courier size 13.  Minimum font size none.

In my OS X preferences font smoothing style is set to automatic and the minimum font size to apply it to is set to 4.

Hopefully this isn't a dup but I couldn't find an identical bug.

Reproducible: Sometimes

Steps to Reproduce:
1.Just browse the web and it will occasionally happen.  Will often be fixed by a reload of the same content so doesn't seem to be determined by just page content.
2.
3.
Actual Results:  
Often fonts have inconsistent weight/boldness.  The right hand side of a line of text will look bolder than the left.

Expected Results:  
Font looks uniform across the line of text.

Comment 1

[Peter Gerdes]

Attachment: Screenshot of font problem

Notice the weirdly bold text on the right hand side of my slashdot comment.

Comment 2

[Peter Gerdes]

Attachment: Same problem on google homepage

Look at the google news widget on the right side of the screen.  It is harder to see with blue text but notice how some of the text looks bolder than other text.