Fonts in Web Browsers

Posted:
in Mac Software edited January 2014
Why do the fonts look really bad in Camino/Mozilla/Netscape ? ( at least when the web page has smaller fonts ) To highlight what I'm saying I have a few screen shots. The default font for both Camino and Safari in these screenshots is Lucida Grande 14pt. ( I think that Camino might have been 15pt, but that still highlights my point since the rendering should have been better at the larger size. )



This is the page rendering in Camino. Notice in particular the 'This page was...' part before the articles are started to be listed.







This is the same page rendered in Safari. Notice how the fonts look 10 times better.







Is there something that I'm doing wrong ? Is there something that I can change to make the fonts look a lot better in Camino ?

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 4
    pyr3pyr3 Posts: 946member
    If I lower the font one or two notches in Camino to 13pt or 14pt, then the font on the 'This page was...' part starts to get all squiched together and looks really crappy. There are some places on versiontracker.com where the fonts have the same problem. I'm sure there are more sites out there with that, but those are the only two I can think of at the moment.
  • Reply 2 of 4
    1337_5l4xx0r1337_5l4xx0r Posts: 1,558member
    I don't know that those fonts look "really bad", rather they are simply unaliased. At lower point sizes, it makes sense to stop blurring the edges of fonts. The threshold point size for this is simply too high for your tastes.



    I personally have no beef with Camino's/Mozilla's font rendering. Then again, I have a background in linux (and recently, OpenBSD) and man, you haven't seen font rendering problems until you've used antialiased fonts under them!
  • Reply 3 of 4
    pyr3pyr3 Posts: 946member
    Unfortunately I have seen anti-aliased fonts under them. Linux fonts problems are horrible. I tried to set the default GTK1.4 font to a True Type font once, and Evolution promply showed really fscked up fonts. The Evolution window bar ceased to have meaningful text in it. It was just a line of about 15 question marks. If that's not font problems, I don't know what is. I was more talking about the rendering of the un-anti-aliased fonts though. It's not the fact that they are not anti-aliased that is the problem. It's the fact that they look bad period. I'll admit that linux is worse, though. The text looks way too blocky. Almost like it's bold or something even though I don't think that it's supposed to be.
  • Reply 4 of 4
    The text looks 'better' because Safari is ignoring the system wide preference for what size of text to turn anti-aliasing off.



    They bypassed the standard API calls in order to speed up rendering. I don't know if they simply forgot about this option or if it is a calculated trade-off.



    That is how the font is supposed to appear given your user options, in fact it has probably been specifically hinted in order to give it that particular look.



    It looks too bold in some places and too thin in others because there are so few pixels to play with and since the minimum is 1 pixel it will almost certainly look bold alongside anti-aliased fonts, as they can use widths that are fractions of a pixel.
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