Forum Discussion
Improve font rendering to be on par with Firefox or at least original Edge
The thing that always made me swithc back to Firefox when trying out Chromium based web browsers was font rendering. You can even see that in the UI of Chromium-Edge, where the Segoe UI font is much thinner than in the rest of the Windows UI.
Some websites, such as reddit.com display text that is not only more blurry than in Firefox (and sometimes original Edge), but also seems to lack contrast - the letters are somewhat brighter, much more grey instead of black like in Firefox.
Here are screenshots that will best show what I mean:
First one is reddit on Firefox:
And this one is on all Chromium based browsers, including Edge:
Notice how the letters on the second screenshot are much harder to read...
51 Replies
We may finally be getting this feature in Edge 92!
https://blogs.windows.com/msedgedev/2021/06/02/improving-font-rendering-in-microsoft-edge/- Edge team, I believe this is the Chromium issue for this light text rendering problem https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=534732
- Also this Chromium issue...
https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=1160271
I noticed several people mention a text enhancer plugin from the Chrome store... Looked it up but the website it links to on the Chrome store goes to a virus/malware page... anyhow I'm the paranoid type and didn't really trust it.
I made my own Edge plugin to enhance the font rendering to be as close as possible to ClearType, got it published on the store: https://microsoftedge.microsoft.com/addons/detail/text-hinting/mnonklhmlgojlbmomnkdmekngokpcdcc
It still uses a hack to approximate ClearType, however I hand-tuned the plugin and tested it out on multiple different screen configurations to get as close as possible. The source code is available at: https://github.com/vsalvino/chromium-texthintif anyone is curious.
It's been quite a long time already and I'm not sure Microsoft is going to do anything about it, unfortunately. I mean... take a look at Explorer and how it shows the letter 'x' in .exe - kerning is completely off and it's been like that for over a year.
It seems Microsoft has a short list of what they want to do with Edge and the rest is completely up to Chromium developers to fix/implement - and they do not feel like doing anything about fonts, based on what I've read on discussion boards etc.
Glad to see MS has finally agreed to improve the font rendering of the new Edge. However, to be honest, I personally think the development is kind of slower than expected. At least at this moment, the new Edge is behind Google's Chrome, the development should be done in a more efficient and aggressive way. There are not many reasons and not much time for people to drop Chrome and embrace Edge again. So hurry up!
Thin font rendering, and lower-contrast font color are the main reasons I won't use Chromium-based browsers. I have trouble seeing low contrast things, and I despise software and websites that do it on purpose.
I currently use Firefox on Windows 10.
Dean72 Do you run Windows? If so, MS Edge works in high-contrast mode. For more details, see https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/13862/windows-10-use-high-contrast-mode
Here's some more info from our https://www.microsoftedgeinsider.com/en-us/whats-new, "both the web browser and web content now fully support the high contrast themes available in Windows. This feature brings significantly improved legibility and readability of textual content. Our implementation of high contrast in the new Chromium-based Microsoft Edge matches the support we offer in legacy Microsoft Edge, and guarantees text readability against any background by adding a text backplate filled with the system background color."Hopefully that helps!Fawkes (they/them)
Project & Community Manager - Microsoft EdgeDeleted Do you know anything about changes in this subject? When can we expect them?
I cannot believe this has marked as "Not applicable". I hate all of the Chromium browsers because of this bug. The way they render fonts is disgusting. This is why I always return to Firefox.
pozxc If you haven't tried it yet, we've diversified our options for font settings, which you can check out here: edge://settings/fonts. We hope that's a satisfactory resolution!
Fawkes (they/them)
Project & Community Manager - Microsoft EdgeDeletedThank you for your reply and the suggestion. I've tried the most recent canary version, which is 81.0.375.0, and all I see in edge://settings/fonts is some regular font family and font size settings:
What I and the original poster tries to mention is the problem that all Chromium browsers have on Windows.
The following screenshot is from Mozilla Firefox:And the following one is from Chromium Edge:
I hope the difference is noticable.
Bonus:
This one is from the non-Chromium Edge (almost equal to Firefox):
- This is the most annoying thing about all Chromium-based products. They do not align with the system font rendering, and the fonts are so thin and low-contrast at small sizes. I don't know how it doesn't bother more people. At any rate, I would hope MS would fix this in Edge before the final release. Millions of people are going to be forced to use new Edge on mostly low-grade corporate computers and kiosks without the permissions to install alternative browsers... at least help it to look readable and native to the OS. If it is a question of "following Google" to maintain exact Chrome compatibility, at least provide a flag to change this.
Deleted
This is a great feature request. Thank you for that suggestion.Gabriel
v-gapart - thank you very much for taking this into consideration! Upon searching for more info about this issue, I found this source code modification: https://codereview.chromium.org/2674883002/diff/1/skia/BUILD.gn
So a simple change of "SK_GAMMA_CONTRAST=0.5" to "1.0" makes the fonts more bold and on par with both Firefox and the old Edge. The screenshot below shows the original Chromium/Edge font rendering (on the right side) and the left one is with the modified contrast value:
There has been some discussion about this, but most of such threads died out after a while, for example, here: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=534732
I also have this issue, its one of the main things i dislike about chromium/new edge
it seems that the cleartype settings defined in the windows OS are not honoured by chromium/new edge
this is often an accessibility issue for me forcing me to further increase font size, zoom, bold which have their own unwanted side effects
in the mean time this chrome extension seems to the best workaround for me:
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/font-expander/fnhfmlkfcdodpcaenlbfjfcahannopkj
likely unrelated but videos in chromium/new edge similarly seem to ignore the driver defined colour settings i use, i have the assumption/perception that these issues are connected as if the "rendering engine" in chromium is completely unable to inherit configurations from the OS, despite most other software doing soDeleted
That is an interesting discovery you have made and I will be sure to bring it to the product team's attention.Gabriel
