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Any Chromium contributors around to answer that one? I've seen it a bunch on some Linux distros and have no idea what's causing it.

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rain

@sunshowers6

Jun 15

Why is Chrome font rendering on Linux so much worse than Firefox? Firefox is on the left -- everything's beautifully laid out, close to perfect to my eyes. Chrome on the other hand, the t's have a weird space after them, the i's meld into the o's--it looks so bad in comparison

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Screenshot of the cargo-nextest homepage on Firefox and Chrome running on Linux -- Firefox (left) has significantly better font rendering than Chrome (right)

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Likely broken font configuration with applications using different versions of the font rendering dependencies. If that's the official Chrome package, these dependencies are bundled and will be different than the OS versions. Most distributions link the system ones for Chromium.

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What if it's only happening for this one specific font?

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It likely has to do with hinting. Most phones aren't high quality ones with great hinting instructions like the Adobe Source family. The desktop Linux font rendering stack uses hinting instructions but has incomplete support for the full feature set used by Windows fonts, etc.

1:25 AM · Jun 16, 2022Twitter Web App

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They've improved it over time but it has also regressed over time. They dropped some of the functionality in recent versions. hintfull does not work properly anymore and shouldn't be used unless you've got some patched freetype, harfbuzz, etc. There's a lot that could be wrong.

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It really doesn't help that there are a bunch of ways to pass these settings to applications beyond this xml fontconfig system. There are also X resources settings and desktop environments have added their own stuff. The fontconfig setup is the fully functional normal way though.