text is too faint compared to Firefox or legacy Edge (Windows 10)

Steel Contributor

I'm sure the Edge team has heard this one but I think it's a high priority because it's honestly tempting me to switch to Firefox: on Windows at least, text is too 'faint' compared to Firefox and legacy Edge. In Firefox, text appears darker and even having slightly more weight, it's very good. The old Edge was very similar to Firefox (at least on my laptop, which uses 200% display scaling). Attached is a zoomed screenshot comparison of some text from the google.com homepage. Chromium-based Edge is on top, Firefox is below the red line. Device is a Surface Pro at 200% display scaling, and webpage zoom is default in both browsers. Please fix this Edge team!edge vs firefox text.png

7 Replies

@Bdsrev Thanks for bringing this up. The good news is that our team is aware of this feedback, and is actively investigating it. (There's a long thread about this here.)

 

Fawkes (they/them)
Program Manager & Community Manager - Microsoft Edge

But Fawkes, that thread is about PDF's. I'm not talking about PDF's, I'm talking about normal websites like google.com . I think these are different issues. Please forward this to the people that are in charge of text for Edge/Windows. (you are the best BTW, thank you so much for replying)

@Bdsrev Thank you for the callout! I had both articles open and linked the wrong one. Here is the correct link.  https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/discussions/improve-font-rendering-to-be-on-par-with-firefox-...

 

Fawkes (they/them)
Program Manager & Community Manager - Microsoft Edge

Can you let the people in charge of text/fonts know that this one is pretty urgent? Considering that both Legacy Edge and Firefox have darker text, I would argue that this is an actual bug, that Chromium-based Edge is not showing text correctly. I have an iPad here too and the text is so much darker than Chromium-Edge on Windows, this is not a low priority issue
Fawkes why isn't this issue in the Top Feedback Summary? I can say with confidence that current text rendering in Edge is actually incorrect. Firefox for Windows, Legacy Edge for Windows and Safari have black text, but Chromium-based Edge for Windows doesn't. This seriously needs to be fixed ASAP, it's not a little tiny annoyance, it's text rendering, this is high priority. Please yell at the team responsible for us hahaha

@Bdsrev Haha, well, I won't be yelling at anyone, but I do have an update. I checked in with the team, and the good news is that they've identified the mechanism behind this and are looking into it.

 

As for the Top Feedback list, it really just comes down to numbers. We focus on which feature requests have the largest volume of submissions from our in-browser feedback tool. So, just because something isn't on the list doesn't mean that it's not a priority to the team; rather, it means we haven't received as many requests for it.

 

Fawkes (they/them)
Program Manager & Community Manager - Microsoft Edge

 

Very happy that the developers have identified the mechanism involved.