Firefox windows xp font smoothing

Hi retep, could you check the Graphics section of the support information page to see what it lists for your graphics card. DirectWrite Enabled false I don't know what those specific issues are, but hopefully a fix will come along in a Windows update or in a change to Firefox.

So after going mad and trying just about everything, the problem seems to have finally been resolved. A massive update to Windows 10 several restarts, big black screen showing update progress after each reboot was released recently and the problems have gone away! Looks like it was a problem on Microsoft's end, not Mozilla's :. Search Support Search.

Learn More. Hi there I just upgraded to FF 40 on my windows It was just too much trouble. Edit : Oh, and my apologies for the sluggishness of my ancient Pentium Pro server. Posting comments here is quite painful, I know…. Even if there are problems on Windows , please let us know, we may be able to resolve them. We respect people still using older OSs, in fact our main dev snowie does too :.

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Windows Registry Editor Version 5. Not ; supported on NT 5. Not supported on NT 5. This may sometimes display ; characters in a condensed or weirdly expanded way. This does usually look fine, ; but sometimes the layout may become glitchy. The original ClearType default is 1.

Range is [ Better, but consumes more ; CPU resources. Don't use this on very slow machines. The [IncludeModule] section will not be ; used. The [ExcludeModule] section will not be ; used. However, the results are strikingly different. Windows users can check OSX rendering by downloading Safari , which has its own font rendering engine, similar to the one used on Macs.

Joel Spolsky discussed these differences in his article Font smoothing, anti-aliasing, and sub-pixel rendering. By default, Windows versions prior to and including XP use no antialiasing at all, producing sharp, but jagged glyphs.

The effect is especially troubling for bigger font sizes. Starting from Windows 95 users could enable standard antialiasing. However, this setting is well hidden , and there are no definite statistics on font smoothing usage.

Starting from Windows Vista, ClearType is on by default, though users could still opt for disabling it in favor of standard antialiasing or no font smoothing at all. Again, there are no statistics on that, so web designers can only assume that the majority of users will follow the default setting. Internet Explorer 7 was the first browser to change that.

By default it has ClearType turned on, regardless of Windows settings. To Windows XP users the text will look very different, depending on whether they use IE7 or another browser. Safari produces the glyphs in a manner similar to Mac OS X, with results that are very different to methods used by Windows. Adobe Photoshop can be used only for a basic check of how the final text will look like.

Yet the text looks significantly worse, apparently due to inferior hinting see figure 2. As you can see, the number of different combinations is significant. The table below summarizes the most common settings.

Unfortunately, a designer cannot ensure that users will see HTML text exactly as designed.