“Their enterprise was neither more just
nor easier, and God was no more
their friend than yours.”
Machiavelli
Sunday, February 17, 2008
Firefox 3: selective anti-aliasing
The latest Firefox 3 builds are really impressive, much lower memory consumption, full page zoom including image resizings, tags in the bookmarks system, among many other changes that finally makes Firefox a nice alternative to Webkit/Safari. Alas... when used with my GreaseMonkey script to provide custom disable-able user stylesheets the font rendering looks just plain awful. Even 8pt fonts are rendered with anti-aliasing.
I’ve just spent a few hours figuring out a bit of the Firefox code base, digging down into the new Cairo based rendering engine, and after figuring out finally that the current system uses a bizarre mix of ATSUI for layouting, and CoreGraphics for glyph rendering I finally put together a patch which I’ve uploaded to a related Mozilla bug report.
So... people who care about having Firefox run well on the Mac. Please vote up:
Bug 389074 – Use Core Text instead of ATSUI to render text
And if you (like me) really love small fixed point fonts, my patch can be found here:
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