I have blurry, faded text in Firefox 4 (but not FF 3 or Chrome)
http://img405.imageshack.us/i/firefox4text.png/
Here is an example from Youtube. Ever since I upgraded from Firefox 3.6 to 4, my text is blurry and thin and hard to read, it looks terrible. This also happens in IE ever since I upgraded to IE9, but I don't care since I rarely ever use IE.
Out of desparation I installed Chrome just so I could browse without struggling to read text, and the text is clear and perfect there.
Can someone please help me get a usable installation of Firefox again? I love the addons and features of Firefox, but not if I can't READ when I'm using it...
All Replies (5)
I forgot to add, I've tried everything I could find to fix this problem. I have Windows 7, I have Cleartype on. I've tried turning off hardware acceleration, my graphics drivers are updated, I've tried going into about:config and forcing DirectWrite to be enabled.
This problem only applies to certain sites (but it is a lot of them). These forums look the same on both FF3 and FF4, for instance. But the majority of sites, including Youtube and all the forum sites that I frequent, have this ugly hard to read text problem going on.
This is an important issue simply because an aging population will move away from an exceptional product because of readability issues. Even as I am writing this posting I have difficulty reading what I am writing.
For example the print images which I would expect to see in "bold black text" appears as grayish.
I have tried all of the suggested workarounds and they are not particularly effective.
None of the workarounds worked for me, I tried half a dozen different things. Honestly it's shocking to me that such a widely used product like Firefox could have such a terrible, un-usable product released to the public.
There are so many nice upgrades in Firefox 4, little extra features that are nice to have, but it is COMPLETELY BROKEN for the single primary purpose of a browser: to browse the web.
Out of curiosity I took a screenshot of text from Firefox 3.6 and zoomed in on it. The text is made out of black pixels and dark brown pixels. I did the same on Firefox 4.0 - it's made out of medium brown, light tan, and pale blue and it all runs together.
I uninstalled Firefox 4.0 after 3 days and went back to 3.6, and will never upgrade it until this issue is fixed. I literally cannot read the blurry text and can't begin to imagine why this was allowed to happen and hasn't been fixed yet.
Try to disable hardware acceleration.
- Tools > Options > Advanced > General > Browsing: "Use hardware acceleration when available"
If disabling hardware acceleration works then check if there is an update available for your graphics display driver.
Those are two of the first things I tried.