Do you have hardware acceleration enabled in Firefox?

[mikeymikec]

ie. the option in Options > Advanced > General, labelled 'use hardware acceleration when available'.

I've generally had it disabled, though I've tried it out from time to time with three different graphics cards (GeForce 7600GS, ATI HD 5770, GeForce GTX 750Ti) and two hardware/OS platforms. It just seems to subtly mangle/blur smaller fonts slightly, particularly in the UI.

 

[Morbus]

I have, and I couldn't give a damn.

Font rendering was broken for a while, but not because of hardware acceleration per se, more because of the stuff they implemented alongside, but they have since fixed it for the most part.

I used to use an extension to customize the font-rendering but I don't use it anymore.

 

[Ketchup]

I have never disabled this feature, mainly because I have never seen a reason to (this goes for the system in my sig and the laptops).

 

[mikeymikec]

I was going to post a screengrab of the difference only to find that the problem wasn't occurring at that exact moment (despite occurring about an hour before).

 

[Chiefcrowe]

It is enabled here and I haven't really noticed any issues.

 

[sswingle]

Didn't know it existed. Its on, i assume by default.

 

[TheRyuu]

ie. the option in Options > Advanced > General, labelled 'use hardware acceleration when available'.

I've generally had it disabled, though I've tried it out from time to time with three different graphics cards (GeForce 7600GS, ATI HD 5770, GeForce GTX 750Ti) and two hardware/OS platforms. It just seems to subtly mangle/blur smaller fonts slightly, particularly in the UI.

You can change the font rendering without disabling hardware acceleration:

gfx.font_rendering.cleartype_params.rendering_mode

-1 = default
 2 = GDI Classic

Those are generally the only two options you'd want. Keep in mind that Firefox already has a built in list of fonts which will use GDI rendering (i.e. the sharpest rendering) so you don't gain much by changing it.

You shouldn't have to disable hardware acceleration, any issues they may have had with it have been fixed for such a long time now.

 

[mikeymikec]

I've been trying to get a good screenshot to show the difference on my setup between the font renderings, and while I've failed to do that, I found something else really strange instead - the page is being rendered differently, but with regard to vertical spacing.

If you open these two images in separate tabs it'll be a lot easier to see what I mean. These are screenshots of the same page but with acceleration on or off. In both cases I cropped the image from the very top of the web page down to the border of the page section with the 'visitor messages' tab. I wasn't so careful horizontally, but I didn't notice any difference there. I've saved the original screenshots just in case I need to refer back to them.

@ TheRyuu

I'm trying your font rendering suggestion now, thanks for that.

PS - these screenshots were taken before I changed the font rendering setting.

 

[Berryracer]

Always had it enabled. Would never want to run my browser using CPU only

 

[nemesismk2]

i have it enabled because i have no problems.