Suggestion: Use Liberation fonts as default in Firefox 3

[Nicolas Mailhot]

Le Lun 28 janvier 2008 15:38, Mark a écrit :

> I have Firefox 3 now on Fedora rawhide and i really disliked the
> default fonts

That happens

> so i played a little with it till i got acceptable
> results.

Thanksfully our font selection is large enough you can find
alternatives (at least for latin) now

> As you can see in [2] is that the fonts are looking just better.

No we can't.

I'm afraid that "looking better" is largely subjective when talking
about fonts. In particular people exhibit a huge bias in favour of
whatever font style they're used to. Take any decent modern font,
force a user to use it exclusively for a month, and he'll
systematically prefer it afterwards in tests. (hey, some people even
ended up liking Luxi *shudder*)

So the only thing you've proved is you're used to a style similar to
Liberation Sans, probably Arial. Had you spent the time to accustom
yourself to Fedora defaults you'd be finding Liberation Sans terrible.

Given that Liberation and DejaVu are about similar quality-wise, and
some people will hate one and others the reverse, other considerations
like encoding coverage and upstream reactiveness prevail, and right
now DejaVu wins those.

P.S. Though you've still kept Serif as default Firefox family, which
*is* an ass-backwards Firefox default we should change, since current
screens do not have enough resolution to display satisfying Serif
fonts.

P.P.S. Likewise Mozilla developpers decided at some time monospace
should be scaled down for no particular good reason, and site authors
are still fighting this error back with CSS hacks

P.P.P.S. Also your screenshot exhibits the fugly color fringing of
subpixel hinting. It may have been your misguided choice, or the
effect of rawhide currently ignoring user settings to use grayscale
only. In any way it's not the fonts fault.

Regards,

-- 
Nicolas Mailhot