Firefox 3 Can Render Technology Correctly
October 27th, 2007
The word “Technology” that is. In other browsers, the “e” is too far away from the capital “T”. Here’s a screenshot of Firefox 3, Safari 3, and Opera 9.24 on Mac OS X 10.4:
I don’t think anything has changed on Leopard, but I could be wrong.
October 27th, 2007 at 12:45 am
Fx 3.0a9pre (nightly, oct 27th) on Windows Vista renders it like the later two. Which way is actually correct?
October 27th, 2007 at 2:03 am
Under Windows XP, the changes in Fx 3 mean that it’s rendering characters much more similar to IE now, because it’s using uniscribe just like IE, which means also lot of bugs are corrected.
So what’s the deal with Safari 3 ? It’s hard to think they are not using the best graphic library the platform provides. Or are they deliberately disabling kerning for performance ?
October 27th, 2007 at 8:28 am
Is this perhaps a font rendering issue in the browser? Does this happen in the offending browsers with other font families for the word “Technology”? Or, the flipside, does Firefox do this with other font families?
October 27th, 2007 at 8:45 am
You aren’t wrong. Safari 2 on Tiger still shows the same gap between these both letters. Still an issue for other browsers.
October 27th, 2007 at 11:57 am
> Or are they deliberately disabling kerning for performance ?
Yes. Last I checked, they are. And last I checked it was using non-public APIs to do so…. That might have changed.
October 28th, 2007 at 10:48 am
You can disable kerning and ligatures in ATSUI. Disabling those features can be done with public API. And yes, we disable them in Safari because they cause a gigantic speed hit in our performance benchmarks (on the order of a 25% speed regression). Uniscribe in Safari for Windows incurs a similar level of speed regression.
We may yet figure out a way to do kerning in a fast performant way, but right now the slightly improved rendering isn’t worth the speed hit. (One idea we’ve thought about is doing kerning if the font size is large enough, since lack of kerning at smaller font sizes is less obvious.)
October 28th, 2007 at 8:54 pm
Yep, there’s a tradeoff there. I’m not sure it’s 25% of anything, but it’s a fair point. Maybe we’ll use CoreText when it’s available.
October 29th, 2007 at 9:59 am
Another performance hit for Firefox? Great. I recently switch to Camino and gave up my beloved extensions because I couldn’t deal with the unbelievably bad performance of Firefox on my Mac. Camino is now happily rendering pages roughly 5x faster than Firefox was.
I really don’t know why Firefox is so much faster on Windows.
October 29th, 2007 at 1:16 pm
The kerning is no doubt worth it, anything that makes text more readable is a good thing (as long as you can turn it off on slower machines).
This is one of the few times I think we can indulge ourselves thanks to the power of modern computers
October 29th, 2007 at 1:48 pm
Hi Bob,
I’m discussing Firefox 3, which has had several radical Mac changes vs Firefox 2. Complaints are always accepted , but please don’t assume we’re adding yet another thing to an otherwise unchanged program.
October 29th, 2007 at 5:46 pm
I’ve become so used to the way it looks with the gap that it looks funny without it.
April 9th, 2008 at 8:29 am
[...] The above quote is taken from: http://blog.mozilla.com/rob-sayre/2007/10/27/firefox-3-can-render-technology-correctly/ [...]
April 18th, 2008 at 4:11 am
Is there any possiblity to turn off kerning from the webpage?
I have a webpage where I defenitely not want it to be kerned (or alternatively have two letters still be kerned when I split them with a span)