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December 11, 2006

internet

Firefox text handling follow up

Posted Dec. 11, ’06, 6:29 AM PT by Derik DeLong
Category | Internet

Text Handling Jon Hicks saw Zeldman’s article on Firefox’s poor text handling and has responded with information about Cairo, the next big thing in Mozilla product text handling. He breaks it down about why Mozilla products will suddenly improve rather drastically (see picture attached).

As highlighted recently by Jeffrey Zeldman, Firefox text rendering lags behind that of Safari, or rather Gecko lags behind WebKit. This is because at present, Gecko browsers use the older Quickdraw graphics library, originally developed for OS 9, rather than Quartz, or the more recent Core Image libraries. Its been the main reason I prefer Omniweb or Safari over Camino/Firefox, text just looks SO much crisper and smoother.

Things are about to change however, as the switch to the Cairo graphics library in Gecko browsers will allow them to use Core Image on the OS X platform. There is already a developer release of Firefox 3.0, codenamed Gran Paradiso with Cairo enabled. You can also grab a latest trunk build of Camino, which also uses Cairo.

I’m crossing my fingers that Firefox 3.0 will finally start to look and feel like an OS X application.


7 Comments

Moe said:

Is this like audiophiles who complain about 128kb MP3 music not being "good enough"? I guess what I'm asking here is how many people pay this much attention to the way their fonts look?

December 11, 2006 7:55 AM
GetUp said:

Me, for example. International (native to me, cyrillic, for example) pages in FF look simply AWFUL.

December 11, 2006 8:25 AM
flyermoney said:

"Is this like audiophiles who complain about 128kb MP3 music not being "good enough"? I guess what I'm asking here is how many people pay this much attention to the way their fonts look?"

128Kbs MP3 sounds awful. 192Kbs VBR is the bearable minimum. Unless you like your music sounding like cat vomit.

And when you read text on the web for hours, it better be legible; not a matter of "I-want-pretty-letters", mostly a case of "I-can-read-for-15-minutes-without-my-eyes-bleeding".

'Nuff said.

December 11, 2006 9:26 AM
Moe said:

@flyermonkey - 128kbs MP3 sounds awful.

Thus demonstrates the relativity of all things that involve humans. You can tell the difference. A lot of folks (like myself) cannot. To us, there is very little appreciable difference in sound between a full WAV file ripped off a CD and a "lossy" MP3 even at encodings as low as 128kb.

Keep in mind that folks like me listen to music on our iPods with regular, cheap headphones. I refuse to pay $50USD+ for earbuds. Perhaps if I plugged my iPod into a nice stereo I could tell the difference, but for what I use, they're the same.

December 11, 2006 9:49 AM
woop said:

exactly moe! if you're only going to listen to your music on cheapass earphones, of course you can't tell the difference. as where people like flyer and i like to enjoy music on good car and home speakers. same goes with the fonts, legibility is a huge deal!

December 11, 2006 10:08 AM
GetUp said:

To Moe:
Just go to http://rus.delfi.lv, and figure :)

December 11, 2006 11:03 AM
Moe said:

The fonts look just fine for me in Firefox 2. Of course, I don't speak Russian(?), so perhaps if I were really *reading* them I could tell a difference. ;)

December 12, 2006 6:12 AM

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