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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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and

gist.github.com/thestinger/767 in ~/.config/fontconfig/fonts.conf is a reasonable default configuration. Important to note that hintfull is no longer properly supported in the current font rendering stack and auto-hinting has always been prone to very weird issues depending on fonts.

gist.github.com

fonts.conf

GitHub Gist: instantly share code, notes, and snippets.

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Interesting... any idea why Firefox is totally fine tho?

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No, but it's quite possible one of them is respecting settings from something like GTK or GNOME configuration and the other is ignoring them. Chromium and Firefox both have quirky desktop Linux integration because there's no standard way to do a lot of the things they want.

1:44 AM · Jun 16, 2022Twitter Web App

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A common thing I run into is websites using your local fonts when available and serving woff2 variants when they aren't. I can see a huge difference between the woff2 Roboto from Google Web Fonts and the one provided by in the Arch Linux repositories as just one example.

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Huge difference in which direction?

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From my digging into this, Firefox is better at respecting the actual font configuration, but this causes other problems in some cases where distro maintainers ship broken font configurations from ChromeOS:

bugzilla.mozilla.org

1481545 - Poor kerning of fully hinted fonts on Linux (affects Roboto -> Gmail)

REOPENED (nobody) in Core - Layout: Text and Fonts. Last updated 2021-03-13.

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Here's another example of distro's just shipping wildly broken font configuration files:

bugzilla.mozilla.org

1763175 - Firefox font regression in Arch Linux (KDE plasma 5.24.4)

RESOLVED (nobody) in Core - Widget: Gtk. Last updated 2022-04-09.

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