659211 - tooltip text is drawn with grayscale anti-aliasing

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 629891

(Core :: Graphics, defect)

Description

[John Daggett (:jtd)]

Steps to reproduce:

1. Open www.cnn.com
2. Move the mouse over 'World' in the subject menu

Result: tooltip appears 'World News Headlines...' and is drawn with grayscale anti-aliasing which makes the text appear "fuzzy" compared to properly drawn subpixel anti-aliased text.

Comment 1

[Timothy Nikkel (:tnikkel)]

Bug 629891 covers the same issue, although we may want to just close that bug since a patch landed from that bug to fix the problem in Windows XP.

Comment 2

[BRDTO]

This bug is still present in Firefox 5 (stable). There are several places were I saw Firefox 5 use greyscale-aa under Windows 7 (with Aero enabled).

Actually this bug applies to:
- tooltip texts
- the tooltip shown in the lower left when hovering over links
- adress bar
- search bar
- fonts on tabs (not always though, I'm not sure what's the reason yet)
- some dropdown lists on websites

This bug is quite annoying and makes the move to DirectDraw font rendering even more unappealing.

Comment 3

[John Daggett (:jtd)]

(In reply to comment #2)
> This bug is still present in Firefox 5 (stable). There are several places
> were I saw Firefox 5 use greyscale-aa under Windows 7 (with Aero enabled).
> 
> Actually this bug applies to:
> - adress bar
> - search bar
> - fonts on tabs (not always though, I'm not sure what's the reason yet)
> - some dropdown lists on websites

Could you attach screenshots for these?  I haven't seen this in the elements you describe above, I'd be interested to know how to reproduce the behavior you're seeing.

Comment 4

[BRDTO]

Attachment: Shows the places were greyscale anti aliasing is used instead of subpixel anti aliasing

I added an attachment were you can see all places were greyscale anti aliasing is used instead of subpixel anti aliasing (Though I couldn't find an example for a dropdown box yet).

I was able to reproduce the problem with a clean profile. Steps to reproduce:
- tooltip texts: simply hover mouse over an element that has a tooltip, e.g. the "flags"-sections of a bug entry on bugzilla.mozilla.org (not visible in the attachment but verified by me on the same page).
- the tooltip shown in the lower left when hovering over links: just hover over a link (see attachment)
- adress bar: set "Tabs on Top" to false. Nothing else needed to do (see attachment)
- search bar: set "Tabs on Top" to false. Nothing else needed to do (see attachment)
- fonts on tabs: visit https://bugzilla.mozilla.org and activate this tab, then all tabs will use greyscale anti aliasing (see attachment). On other pages, e.g. a blank page correct subpixel anti aliasing is used, though.

Comment 5

[mq521]

Attachment: grayscale AA in tooltip in safemode

Comment 6

[mq521]

Attachment: Grayscale AA is also present in Fx menu

I also noticed this long ago in nightlies. At first I thought something was broken again, but after a month or two, issue persisted. After updating to 8.0a1, and changing a few TabMix+ settings for tab appearance, it somehow fixed subpixel AA for tabs (even in safemode, weird). I still have grayscale AA in Menu Bar menus, Fx menu, context menus and statusbar/addonbar as well.