What do you mean by ugly? That GDI text rendering is used on Windows instead of DirectWrite for some font families? This can be disabled in about:config by assigning `gfx.font_rendering.cleartype_params.force_gdi_classic_for_families` an empty value. Or do you mean that there's no subpixel positioning on non-Windows/macOS? That one has no fix, except when the text rendering part of WebRender goes into production.

I'm confused. Doesn't Firefox use Freetype on Linux? Freetype has subpixel rendering.

Subpixel rendering is different from subpixel positioning.

See e.g. https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=824153 for some gory details.

AFAICT Firefox text rendering has always been fine on Linux. Chrome until a year or two ago had no subpixel antialiasing, different gamma for antialiasing, or whatever - its text rendering used to look ugly, or more neutrally: different from everything else.

Firefox follows my system font renderer settings. Am I missing something else?

What platform do you see this on? Other than subpixel positioning on Linux/Android, Firefox should render text the same as Chrome.

I don't know why parent was downvoted. This is on top of the list of things that kept me from switching back to FF.

This is how every thread on this topic goes. 99% downvoted and hate directed towards me. A couple of people chime with “yeah I agree with you”. And nothing changes because it cannot. Because it’s based on preference.