I have noticed an issue with font smoothing on Firefox 3 ever since I upgraded my home WinXP machine last week. Namely, my fonts seem to be “ghosted” by red borders. My guess is that this is some kind of sub-pixel smoothing gone awry. As a matter of comparison, I am showing Habari’s admin menu in Firefox 3 and Safari 3.1.1 (I am comparing with Safari because I no longer have Firefox 2 on my machine). In most circumstances, I would say that Safari goes overboard with the anti-aliasing/sub-pixel smoothing, at least with small fonts. However, in this case it clearly looks better. In fact, it looks very much like the menu used to look on Firefox 2.
Is anyone else seeing this? I am curious if this is a Cairo graphics problem (newly integrated in Firefox 3) or a WinXP problem.
It’s actually both. If you have enabled clear type smoothing and you use Firefox 3, you’d have that. Firefox 2 does not have that effect in the Habari menu even if smoothing is set to clear type. As for who’s problem it is, well I say Mozilla, just because clear type exists long before FF3 ;)
I finally found an existing bug report for this on bugzilla. It seems that it is a cleartype+cairo+opacity problem. Does not look like anyone has a fix for it yet.
Actually, i’ve never seen fonts displayed very clearly on any PC browser. Well, except for in flash. Love to see that change some day.