751083 - DirectWrite off on 50% of windows 7 machines

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(Firefox :: Untriaged, defect)

Description

[u295173]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1; rv:11.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/11.0
Build ID: 20120312181643

Steps to reproduce:

I created a littele Javascript that checks if DirectWrite subpixel positioning is active in your browser.
It works by comparing the width of a div at a small font size to the width of a div at large font sizes.
I ran the test on multiple websites with thousands of visitors.

Check the script here:
http://jossele.de/font-direct-write-detect.html



Actual results:

I realised that DirectWrite (with subpixel positioning) in Firefox is only activated on 4% of the Windows 7 machines.


Expected results:

It should be activated on much more machines to have consitent rendering and more people benefit from better text rendering.

Comment 1

[u295173]

For information what i mean with subpixel positioning, see this post:
http://blog.mozilla.org/nattokirai/2011/08/11/directwrite-text-rendering-in-firefox-6/

Comment 2

[Robert Longson [:longsonr]]

I have a Windows 7 machine with DirectWrite enabled and yet your script displays DirectWrite subpixel positioning: false

I think you need to choose a different font to Verdana as by default that is in the default gfx.font_rendering.cleartype_params.force_gdi_classic_for_families list.

Comment 3

[u295173]

Ok. Thanks! I just realised this. I will check it and write again in a few minutes. Sorry!

Comment 4

[Robert Longson [:longsonr]]

Returns true now you've changed it so you need to start your survey again.

Comment 5

[u295173]

Ok. Now with different fonts I detect that DirectWrite is on on approximately 50% of the machines. Much better but than my previous results but still not perfect. Is this because of blacklisting of old drivers?
IE9 has 99% here!

Now I could close the bug or ask you guys to consider enabling it on more machines... But I guess you already considered that.

Comment 6

[Stefan Weiss [:sir_none]]

Hello,

I try to cleanup old bugs, so i found this one.
do you have new values on this?
because 2 years goes on and i think there was some updates for this.
maybe we can finaly close it already?

thanks for your help.

Comment 7

[Stefan Weiss [:sir_none]]

Closed -> no feedback from reporter.

please feel free to reopen this report if you have new or additional information.
thank you for your help.