I read the post using Firefox on Windows, and even though I've been aware of the font rendering controversy for a while, I was actually shocked by just how huge the difference was between the crisp, properly rendered text in the article and the font rendering in the "before" screenshot.

Yeah it's definitely an improvement, but even with the "after" screenshot I can't imagine voluntarily using this % scaled rendering. I'm going to turn into a bitmap font absolutist.

Bitmaps are great in terminal windows, but for apps like browsers where they can't be used easily, that's still fine because you can work around it.

Simply turn off anti-aliasing, and use a period-specific font that was designed for presentation without anti-aliasing such as the MS core truetype fonts (e.g. Verdana, Arial, etc.) It will look fine IF you have full hinting turned on.

Not surprising as the Firefox devs invested a lot of effort into high-quality, gamma-correct subpixel text rendering that worked well with hardware accelerated compositing. One of the reasons I stuck with it.

Reading through one of the GTK4 issue threads, it seems that one problem with early versions was an insufficient gamma correction strategy.

Mmmh do you mean https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/issues/3787 ? Because the mentioned MR [1] discussion seems calm?

[1] https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/merge_requests/6190

Yes. The MR linked above is calm, but the mentioned background issue was not.