Black fonts are more gray than black

Brass Contributor

Hi! Please make the new chromium Edge render black fonts black, not Grey, if you open Outlook.com and compare the fonts, new edge's are greyish and more difficult to read specially on Hi res screens. Thanks and Good Job, current dev build runs good!  

 

(Edit) Magnifying the image it seems that new edge do more antialiasing and the classic edge do it more sharp, so I thinks it's a matter of tastes

9 Replies
Thank you for your feedback, @Sergio Hernandez. I will make sure the right people are aware of this.

@Elliot Kirk   Thanks ! I have commented on the subject with my colleagues at work and they think maybe I'm a little picky :D  

@Sergio Hernandez I commented on this yesterday and it has been bugging me enough I did a little more digging.

 

It appears the old edge doesn't use a true greyscale with its anti-aliasing. I think this is what is leading to the new edge text looking washed out. I've included some reference examples below. The first is at normal text size and the other is magnified 800%. It appears they do a similar level of anti-aliasing just using different color paletes. (For reference, this text was grabbed from CNN.com's current headline article.)

 

I definitely find the old syte easier to read.

 

ExdgeTextComaprisonSmall.PNGExdgeTextComaprisonMagnified.PNG

It also found that in my personal 1440p monitor the difference is more noticeable than in the office 1080p. Maybe ips vs lcd and contrast/brightnes configuration makes it more visible too.

@Sergio Hernandez & @BruceLH thank you for digging in.  I have copied this thread into our bug database and sent it to the rendering team for triage.

Elliot

@BruceLH @Sergio Hernandez Thank you so much for this feedback. You're not being picky at all, this is one that we actually addressed in EdgeHTML in 2016. We're actively investigating this space to understand further the design decisions made by the Chromium community. Thanks again for your feedback; keep it coming!

Thanks for your response  @gregwhitworth  !

@Sergio Hernandez Agree, this seems to be common in newer apps and GUIs - thin grey fonts. Can't figure out why - low luminance contrast is never easy to read. Side by side with IE11 with everything zoomed to the same size, Canary is much lighter, thinner, and hard to read. This may be as a result of newer SW scaling fonts in linear light rather than in the usual gamma space. When you have thin black lines on a white background, scaling in gamma space makes the grey edges of those lines darker, making the line look wider - and easier to read. When you scale in linear light it's more "correct", but black on white text gets thinner and lighter = bad. Definitely needs a fix. Side by side open amazon.com and search for anything - easy to see difference. Otherwise Canary working out great.

Watching something like that on youtube