Trouble reading text in FireFox

[Tei]

Not sure if this is something significant or i’m just making a silly random observation but i’ve been having some problems with reading text in FireFox.

i’m still using a low-resolution CRT and assumed there was something wrong with my monitor. So i took a screenshot of the fuzzy text i’m having trouble with, pasted it in MSPaint, blew it up and lo and behold; BLUE and ORANGE pixels.

it seems like a LOT of websites now are displaying text in scaled blue and orange instead of grey. Every site on the CheezBurger network is doing it, several blog sites i visit and even Google results are showing now in non-mono-chrome text. it’s making my eyes BUG THE FUCK OUT. Most websites i frequent are fine and still easy to read, but just recently, i keep finding instances of multi-colored fonts; something i could SWEAR i’ve never seen before.

is there something going on with how my software renders text or is this something that’s been done since forever and i’m just too dumb to have noticed?

[align=center]Not sure if going crazy…

…or just unobservant.[/align]

-Kawai Tei-

[pfannkuchen_gesicht]

it’s W7’s improved font rendering, calibrating it helps to make it more readable if it’s not by default.

[Tei]

'cept im still using XP Pro.
The change took place about a week or two ago. i didn’t make any changes to my font settings or updated FireFox either. it’s like it popped up overnight. Up until now i’ve only seen text rendered in one color scale (black/grey, blue, red, etc).

This text looks like it’s trying to appear 3D. Like with those old red and blue glasses.

-Kawai Tei-

[Dreadmoth]

What you’re seeing is Firefox’s implementation of subpixel font rendering.
It’s meant to improve the readability of text on LCD monitors, but on CRTs (and LCDs running at a non-native resolution) it just looks terrible. Some people see the colour halos around the letters more easily than others and can find them distracting/unpleasant/painful to look at (even when the effect is displayed correctly).
For some reason there doesn’t seem to be a way to disable it using the normal Firefox interface, but you could try this:

1. Type about:config into the address bar and press enter.
2. Find the setting gfx.font_rendering.cleartype_params.rendering_mode and change the value to 1. If that doesn’t work, try some other values - hopefully one of them will look better than what you’re currently seeing; if not, set the value to -1 (which is the default).

[sersoft]

disable cleartype in XP display properties > effects

[bigfan421]

Hold Ctrl, Scroll up on the mouse. Should increase the size of everything in your browser window in firefox.