812871 - Context menu items font rendering issues on Windows XP

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Core :: Graphics: Text, defect)

Description

[Bram Speeckaert]

Attachment: Nighty 19.0a1 (2012-11-17)

Highlighted context menu item font rendering seems to have changed between versions and looks off in comparison to how it used to look and how they look in other applications.

Most context menus seem to be affected, except for some items and submenus in the menu bar. I haven't checked Windows 7 yet, but I suspect this might only occur in Windows XP.

I've attached a screenshot of how the context menus look when right clicking a page in the latest Nightly.

Comment 1

[Bram Speeckaert]

Attachment: Firefox 16.0.2

How it looks (and probably should look) in Firefox 16.0.2.

Might be unrelated, but I've been seeing all sorts of font issues on Windows XP lately (I even added some to bug 758862, but all of those are fixed now on my end).

Comment 2

[Manuela Muntean [Away]]

Tried this on the latest release (Firefox 17) and on the latest Nightly and it looks the same to me.

Firefox 17:
User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1; rv:17.0) Gecko/17.0 Firefox/17.0
Build ID: 20121119183901

Latest Nightly:
User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1; rv:20.0) Gecko/20.0 Firefox/20.0
Build ID: 20121126030823

Comment 3

[Ioana (away)]

Bram, do you have any add-ons installed that could affect the way the browser looks (themes, personas, or other add-ons)?

Comment 4

[Bram Speeckaert]

I only have three active add-ons: Adblock Plus 2.2.1, QuickDrag 2.1.3.21 and Woordenboek Nederlands 3.1.0. Situation remains the same in safe mode, so I guess that rules that out. No themes or personas either, just the standard Firefox interface (with small icons, and no, that doesn't seem to be the problem either).

The issue now seems to have crept into the current release as well. I just updated a separate portable Firefox installation on the same machine from 17.0.1 to 18.0. The former did not suffer from the issue, the latter does.

Comment 5

[Ioana (away)]

Works fine for me on Windows XP with the latest Firefox 19 build:
ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/nightly/19.0b1-candidates/build3/win32/en-US/.

Bram, can you please try to reproduce this bug with the build above?

Comment 6

[Bram Speeckaert]

Certainly. Yes, the bug is present in that build too.

Comment 7

[Bram Speeckaert]

Okay, I've spent some time to find out more details about this bug, hoping this would be a good first bug to resolve by myself. Here's what I've found:

1) The issue only appears when using a flat menu style. Windows XP has two different (context) menu styles; flat menus and 3D border menus.
2) ClearType must be enabled, obviously.
3) I've managed to narrow down the issue to the following changeset range:

WORKS:
http://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/rev/9f476b4ac1e1
FAILS:
http://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/rev/9bf0072dcd72

I couldn't narrow it down any further than that, because the changesets in between won't build.

Comment 8

[Bram Speeckaert]

I just noticed the problems aren't limited to context menus. The downloads popup also suffers from this. I normally use small icons, but upon disabling that selected text in the location bar showcases a similar problem.

Comment 9

[Jonathan Kew [:jfkthame]]

Note that your screenshots (comparing FF16 and FF19) show a significant difference in the rendering of the unhighlighted disabled items (in gray), as well as the highlighted item.

Looking at the pushlog range:

http://hg.mozilla.org/integration/mozilla-inbound/pushloghtml?fromchange=9f476b4ac1e1&tochange=9bf0072dcd72

it seems to be (mainly) DLBI.

I haven't investigated how the disabled text is styled, but I wonder if it's using partial opacity (rather than an opaque gray color), and this is being handled differently as a result of the changed invalidation behavior?

Comment 11

[al_9x]

Bug 677144 is probably related, though it applies to content.

Comment 12

[al_9x]

both inv(In reply to al_9x from comment #11)
> Bug 677144 is probably related, though it applies to content.

both involved bad cleartype in light on dark text

Comment 13

[Cosmin Muntean [:cmuntean], Ecosystem QA]

Hi,

It seems that in the newest versions of Firefox the context menu has changed. It does not look anymore like in the provided screenshot. 

Considering this I will close this issue as Resolved - WFM. If anyone thinks that is still an issue, feel free to reopen the issue and provide more information.

Thanks,
Cosmin.

Comment 14

[Bram Speeckaert]

Issue is still present in Firefox 48.0a1 (2016-03-25). I'll attach new screenshots.

Comment 15

[Bram Speeckaert]

Attachment: Firefox 48.0a1 (2016-03-25)

Comment 16

[Bram Speeckaert]

Attachment: Notepad - text context menu

Comment 17

[Bram Speeckaert]

Attachment: Firefox 48.0a1 (2016-03-25) - text context menu

Comment 18

[Cosmin Muntean [:cmuntean], Ecosystem QA]

Attachment: Screenshot context.jpg

Firefox: 45.0.1, Build ID: 20160315153207
User Agent:  Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1; rv:45.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/45.0

I have tested again this issue on the latest Firefox (45.0.1) release, latest Nightly (48.0a1 - Build ID: 20160330030326) build but I still can not reproduce it (see attachment). Have you encounter this issue only on Firefox?

Also, can you please retest this using latest Firefox release and latest Nightly build (https://nightly.mozilla.org/) and report back the results ? When doing this, please use a new clean Firefox profile, maybe even safe mode, to eliminate custom settings as a possible cause (https://goo.gl/PNe90E). 

Thanks,
Cosmin.

Comment 19

[Bram Speeckaert]

ClearType text rendering is not enabled in your screenshots. As I point out in comment 7, that is one of the preconditions for this bug to appear.

Comment 20

[Bram Speeckaert]

Yes, Firefox is the only program in which this issue occurs.

Just retested Firefox 45.0.1, as well as Nightly 48.0a1 (2016-03-31). I tried safe mode and a clean profile, but the problem remained in all cases.

Comment 21

[Cosmin Muntean [:cmuntean], Ecosystem QA]

Attachment: screenshot2.jpg

Hi Bram,

I have tested again on two different machines, on Windows XP x32 and Windows XP x64 with Clear Type enabled but I can not reproduce the issue (see attachment). How did you set a flat menu? Or have you made other configurations?

Thanks,
Cosmin.

Comment 22

[Bram Speeckaert]

I think there might be a slight difference between Firefox and Notepad even on your last screenshot, but it's hard to tell for sure due to the JPEG artifacts. Maybe you can make another one and save it as PNG?

In any case, the problem does appears to be much less pronounced for you. It may have something to do with how ClearType was tuned on your installation. Install the ClearType Tuner PowerToy [1] if you don't have it. If I turn it up to the darkest setting (1.0), I get something similar to your last screenshot. I had mine on 1.4.

From your screenshot it looks like you already have the flat menu style (it is on by default on XP for everything but the classic theme).

[1] https://www.microsoft.com/typography/ClearTypePowerToy.mspx

Comment 23

[Cosmin Muntean [:cmuntean], Ecosystem QA]

Attachment: screenshot3.png

Hi Bram,

I have installed ClearType Tunwe PowerToy and I have set darkest setting at 1.4, but still I can not reproduce it (see attachment). Are there any additional notes that may help us to reproduce this issue? 

Thanks,
Cosmin.

Comment 24

[Bram Speeckaert]

Attachment: Top: Firefox, Bottom: Notepad

You can actually see a difference between Notepad and Firefox on your screenshot if you zoom in (see attachment). In Notepad the text has blue and red-tinted pixels on the left and right sides respectively. This is not the case in Firefox, which appears to be incorrectly rendering the text in grayscale.

I'm still not sure why it's not as pronounced for you as it is on my end. I should mention that hardware acceleration is disabled on my end, due to blacklisted graphics hardware. I've been able to replicate this on real hardware as well as in virtual machines running Windows XP, so it's definitely not an isolated case.

Comment 25

[Adolfo Jayme]

This is not worth debugging anymore; we’ve dropped XP support a while ago.

Comment 26

[Sylvestre Ledru [:Sylvestre]]

Indeed, closing.