DirectWrite text rendering survey
June 23rd, 2011 by John DaggettFirefox 4.0 uses the DirectWrite text rendering API if it’s available on your Windows 7 machine. In order to get a better idea of the range of text rendering behavior that Windows 7 users are seeing, we’ve put together a small text rendering survey. The survey renders content using a variety of Cleartype settings and asks you to choose the rendering that looks most readable to you. For each question, there’s also a comment field so you can point out funny artifacts or anything that seems out-of-place to you.
If you’re using Firefox on a Windows 7 machine, please grab a tasty beverage and take a few minutes to help us out!
Instructions:
- Download the latest nightly build.
- Download the zipfile containing the survey.
- Open the readme.html file.
- Read through the instructions and click on the link to run the survey.
- Click ‘Allow’ in the security dialog to allow the script to modify browser prefs (this is needed to render with various Cleartype settings).
- Run through the survey renderings, selecting what looks best to you.
- Submit the results.
The submitted results contain the sample renderings and your selections along with basic info about your system Cleartype parameter settings, plus your name and email if you supply it.
Thanks very much for your help with this!
June 23rd, 2011 at 7:46 pm
DW rendering is so crispy and ugly… I disabled it to keep GDI+Freetype rendering (with GDI++/GDIPP hack tools).
June 23rd, 2011 at 8:00 pm
My eyes are bleeding! Have to do this test couple of times. Where i can compare my own test results? Interested to see how much my own results differs from other.
Who the hell did this test?
Methods of science
Monkeys so full of winning
Destined to be fast
What?
June 23rd, 2011 at 10:10 pm
That’s a haiku from one of the Javascript team guys!
I’ll try and put together a page with the results once we’ve collected a good sample. Thanks for running through those!
June 24th, 2011 at 5:48 pm
Will there be surveys for language scripts other than Latins? Different scripts may perform best in different rendering modes.
June 24th, 2011 at 10:28 pm
Done! I hope that it will help to improve current Firefox text rendering
June 24th, 2011 at 10:51 pm
Done.Would be intresting to see the results some day.
June 25th, 2011 at 6:42 pm
done!
I hope it will help the team, and i’m also curious for the results.
June 26th, 2011 at 11:02 am
I have hardware acceleration disabled in ff4 /win7.. just so I don’t have the bad font rendering.. so that will be default crispy text with cleartype settings ..whole pixel.
June 28th, 2011 at 11:14 am
Nope. I purposefully installed Firefox 6 because this DW rendering stuff is absolute crap. GDI readable text FTW.
June 30th, 2011 at 4:34 am
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July 5th, 2011 at 2:40 am
just did the survey, i’d love to see the results. right now i disable d2d in all mozilla apps i use but it would be great to have a rendering that just works.
hw-accel ftw ^^
July 8th, 2011 at 10:06 am
Done that test.
Commented as possibly
August 16th, 2011 at 1:13 am
Hey
I’ve got a noob question…
If I browse on Firefox 4 on a Mac OSX (let say Lion as an example), would I see the DirectWrite rendering in FF4 ?
Does FF4 include his own rendering engine that always run over the OS font rendering setting ?
Thanks a lot for your answer
August 16th, 2011 at 9:17 am
@Martin, Firefox always uses the OS font rendering API’s. So on versions of Windows that support DirectWrite you’ll see DirectWrite rendering, GDI rendering otherwise. On OSX you’ll see CoreGraphics rendering, on Linux FreeType rendering. Firefox uses the HarfBuzz shaping library on all platforms, this determines which glyphs are selected and where they are placed, but the actual glyph rasterization is done by an OS library.