Text rendering on Firefox 3
Monday, 18 February 2008
I’ve been running Firefox 3 beta 3 this weekend. I’ve used beta 2 before, but never long enough to do some real testing. One of the things that immediately stood out to me was a change in rendering the labels feature of Gmail. It suddenly look different to me. The text looked clearer and crisper. But that was not the only thing, Google Reader also looked different. So I immediately wondered if the change in graphics back-end to Cairo meant that the text rendering changed.
Firefox 3 on top, Firefox 2 at the bottom
Well, it turns out to be something more mundane. Comparing a screenshots of a text is various sizes revealed that the text is pixel for pixel the same as Firefox 2. So the text rendering hasn’t changed. What did change was the position of the line when text is underlined. It’s now more closer to the text, which accounts for the change in rendering I noticed in Gmail.
Firefox 3 on top, Firefox 2 at the bottom
Strange enough, Firefox 3 renders the text in the main menu of Google Reader bigger than before. The reason is still a mystery to me, because for some weird reason Firefox keep crashing on me when I open Google Reader after installing Firebug. Uninstalling Firebug didn’t help.
Back to Firefox 2 for now…
As long as it doesn’t render text like Safari, I’m good. lol
I’ve noticed this too in text boxes. The text is spread out when I’m typing it, and it looks like crap. This comments box, for example. But when I post it, it looks normal.