Better text rendering in Chromium-based browsers on Windows

It would be great if we could also go ahead and fix subpixel anti-aliasing for OLED screens. People have been been trying for years to get Microsoft&#x27;s attention about this issue. [1]<p>The subpixel layout of OLED screens is different than the the traditional layout, so text ends up looking pretty bad. Patching ClearType would be the first step to fixing this issue. I&#x27;m surprised that none of the display manufacturers have tried twisting Microsoft&#x27;s arm to fix this issue. At the present moment OLED screens are the superior display technology, but cannot be used for productivity because of this issue.<p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;microsoft&#x2F;PowerToys&#x2F;issues&#x2F;25595">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;microsoft&#x2F;PowerToys&#x2F;issues&#x2F;25595</a>

My overriding feeling after reading this is: displaying text is a key job of a web browser. A browser that showed no text would be useless. And yet, after learning that Chromium&#x27;s text looked wrong on Windows (by far the most important platform for Edge and Chrome), it took <i>4 years</i> for the Chromium and&#x2F;or Edge teams to fix it.<p><i>4 years</i> of user research?<p><i>3 years</i> to respect the user&#x27;s ClearType Tuner values?<p>Being a regression from pre-Chromium Edge, this should have been a release blocker on Chromium-based Edge. Instead, text looked bad for 4 years.

Chrome&#x27;s font rendering issue on Windows has been known for more than a decade. Turns out all you need to do is reading proper gamma&#x2F;contrast values from register.<p>But they didn&#x27;t fix it in Skia, so most Skia based projects still have shitty font rendering on Windows.<p>Here is the meta issue tracker:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;issues.chromium.org&#x2F;issues&#x2F;40037626" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;issues.chromium.org&#x2F;issues&#x2F;40037626</a>

I feel like the before&#x2F;after picture is a prank. I can’t tell a difference, at least looking at it on my iPad.

Funny, yesterday I noticed this and thought &quot;huh, it&#x27;s like the text got a bit sharper&quot; and then immediately dismissed it as something I must have made up...

That&#x27;s really great news. I always wondered why text rendering in Chrome looked so much worse than Firefox.

Pretty cool story of mainline Chrome benefiting from changes implemented in Edge.

&gt; One piece of feedback was significant—many Edge users shared that text appeared &quot;washed out&quot; and that it didn&#x27;t look consistent with text in other parts of Windows.<p>&gt; Text looked washed out on Chrome on Windows pre-132.<p>&gt; The team took this feedback seriously and did some investigation.<p>Wait, does &quot;the team&quot; have no eyes&#x2F;visual tests of their own? How can you seriously make a claim about them taking it seriously when they failed to notice this degradation in the first place? Or, for that matter, that it took so long to fix<p>&gt; It was evident that the text contrast value needed to increase, but data was needed to determine how much to adjust it.<p>No, you adjust first until it&#x27;s not &quot;evident&quot; anymore and then waste years on consumer research

I had noticed this in Chrome, and it always irked me! I definitely can see the difference.

One of those things that to me is frustrating is how there is no clear unambiguous definition of what is correct in font rendering. Presumably typeface designers have some specific intent on how heavy strokes and stems are, but then that somehow becomes ambiguous when a font gets rendered on screen.<p>Asking for user feedback feels kinda pointless in that context, does your average user know what some random font <i>should</i> look like? Better would be to ask type designers for feedback on rendering their own typefaces

Chromium on linux has a similar issue, white text &#x2F; dark background, very noticeable on low DPI 1080p screens<p>You can instantly notice it when you try to read comments on youtube (w&#x2F; dark theme)

Why does Chromium need to manually set default contrast&#x2F;gamma values instead of just reading Windows&#x27; default ClearType values? The article mentions they added support for reading ClearType Tuner values last year, so why aren&#x27;t the Windows defaults available through the same API? Seems unnecessarily complex to maintain separate defaults.

Windows has the worst font rendering of all time. Baby steps, I guess? The difference is marginal.

The text rendering looks much better now!<p>Would the same teams at Google be interested in implementing better line breaking? The Japanese text in the screenshot in the article breaks words in half. There&#x27;s a library that does it already; it just needs adding to Chromium: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;google&#x2F;budoux&#x2F;">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;google&#x2F;budoux&#x2F;</a>

Are these defaults part of Skia or Chromium, i.e. will all Skia dependents benefit from this change?

Might be worth noting that Chromium seems to only use subpixel rendering on high-constrast text. I&#x27;ve also seen sites that don&#x27;t use it for some other unknown reason, for example Microsoft Teams.

Chromium can&#x27;t render fonts at all after they got rid of GDI rendering. Just compare Verdana 12pt in Word&#x2F;LibreOffice and Chrome, they&#x27;re not seriously trying to tell me that&#x27;s the correct font? The letters don&#x27;t even look the same.<p>Left is Firefox with GDI, right is Chrome: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.redd.it&#x2F;0fk50cgcexie1.png" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.redd.it&#x2F;0fk50cgcexie1.png</a>

Skia &lt;<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;skia.org" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;skia.org</a>&gt;

I was missing some info about subpixel anti-aliasing (ClearType) and Low- vs Hi-DPI screens.

Perhaps they can fix the extreme slope angle of italics on some sites next.

What about all the designers that used to handle this issue by tweaking their font weights, colors...? Changing a long standing issue with a lot of users will break things for some people (using edge, with an eyes for these details..)

Their experiments started in 2021 and the change was made in 2025? This makes me think AI writing code for us will only speed things up so much.

&gt; After a lot of user research, members of both Edge and Chromium determined that a contrast value of 1.0 closely matched the text rendering of pre-Chromium Edge and looked consistent compared to other native Windows applications.<p>So they decided that not <i>deliberately</i> lowering contrast will fix the contrast problem. So this basically stems from that annoying designer trend of grey text on grey backgrounds that was in turn based on the false assumption that our displays have infinite contrast.

I’ll have to look closer into Skia but DirectWrite is text API par excellence.