Bug 109955 – Font kerning in WebKit is quite bad

• Status: NEW
• Component: Text

I often zoom in on the page when reading web pages. It then becomes clear that the kerning in WebKit (and Safari) on OS X 10.8 is quite bad. It makes the text look bad and makes it a bit annoying to read, since it distracts me from the contents.

I have provided an URL for a page where this is clearly visible, although you can see it in most web pages. For example, look at the words "This" and "violence" in the last paragraph of the blog post, when the text is zoomed to fill the width of you screen. The kerning is noticeably worse than when viewing the page at the same zoom level in, for example, Google Chrome. Firefox does not seem to have a problem with kerning either.

This is all on a MacBook Pro 13" with a retina display. I don't know if the higher resolution makes the bad kerning more or less visible than on a screen with lower resolution.

[Alexey Proskuryakov]

You can use a custom user CSS file with "text-rendering: optimizeLegibility" for higher quality (but slower) rendering.

Thank you, Alexey, that is much better! I didn't know about that option. After a quick look, the kerning now seems to be as good as that in Chrome. This will make reading much more pleasant. :)

[Alexey Proskuryakov]

Im confused about whether bug 100188 enabled this by default. Looks like it should have, but then, why doesn't it work?

I may have been to quick to cheer. The CSS setting definitely improves things but there are still problems, that Chrome doesn't have. 

The URL set for this bug improves a lot, but there are other pages where the improvements are very small. See for example the string "slutat fungera. Resultatet" at http://www.idg.se/2.1085/1.492579/datorn-som-aldrig-kraschar---nu-verklighet . The distances between the letter pairs ta in slutat, fu in fungera and ta in Resultatet are too narrow. Chrome renders it much better (at the same zoom level, where the column width is near screen width).