813625 - No sub-pixel antialiasing in Red Hat Enterprise 6

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Core :: Graphics: Text, defect)

Description

[Alan De Smet]

Attachment: Comparison of rendering by Firefox (left, antialiasing without sub-pixel antialiasing) and gedit (right, full sub-pixel antialiasing, as expected).

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux i686 on x86_64; rv:17.0) Gecko/17.0 Firefox/17.0
Build ID: 20121119183901

Steps to reproduce:

Running Firefox 17.0 or 16.0.2 on Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server release 6.3.  Visit any web site with text.  The system is configured (System > Preferences > Appearance > Fonts) to use "subpixel smoothing" (sub-pixel antialiasing).  Other software correctly implements sub-pixel antialiasing, as observed by sharper text and  verifying that diagonal lines like in X or / have red and blue pixels to either side when magnified with a tool like xmag.

This is a hand-installed copy of Firefox from the official site, not Red Hat's copy (which is stuck at 10.0.something)


Actual results:

Firefox shows no evidence of sub-pixel antialiasing.  Text is less sharp.  When magnified, the text is only rendered in the color of the text; there are no red and blue pixels to either side.


Expected results:

Text in Firefox should be sub-pixel antialiased.

Under Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.something, I was seeing the expected behavior: I was seeing sub-pixel antialiasing using Firefox 16.0.something and, I believe 14.something and 15.something.  Only on reinstalling with RHEL6 did Firefox no longer behave as expected.

Comment 1

[Mike Kaply [:mkaply]]

Martin, I realize this is extremely old, but do you know if this is still a thing?

Comment 2

[Martin Stránský [:stransky] (ni? me)]

RHEL6 is EOL, it's no longer supported by Red Hat. I think we can safely close this one.