Re:Firefox 50.0
by dbl9 on Tuesday November 15, 2016 @02:42PM
(#12961457)
Did something change in font rendering with Freetype on Linux? While 49.0.2 with FreeType 2.7 looked the best (subjectively) I've seen any font rendering (including Windows 10 and OS X Snow Leopard (been a while)), something off with 50.0's rendering. I haven't enabled any custom render options, just your typical archlinux freetype 2.7 desktop. Time to get ESR and compare with that but would be great to hear back from others with a similar environment.
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Freetype 2.7 introduced a new rendering engine. I cannot link anything at the moment but the Arch Forums have pretty detailed help.
I love 2.7's rendering engine and 49.0.2 looked great, but 50.0 looks washed out. Tried ESR 45.5.0 and it looks great again. I'm confused as to what may have happened from 49 to 50 that caused this.
Built 50.0 with cairo-gtk2 backend using it right now but something different with the font rendering in 50.0. For instance there's a weird washed-out effect of the text in this very same text control I'm writing the comment in which comes and goes with the amount of text changing/wrapping etc.
Can you post a screenshot?
Sorry I can't because it's something that happens and doesn't stay. If you run Firefox 50 on Arch Linux, you will see what I mean.
I think I figured it out. Somehow Skia was enabled in Firefox and resetting that seems to have fixed the rendering bug. Given that 51 will turn Skia on by default I hope this will be fixed before the switch.