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11.4 Firefox Text Sharpness

4

4330thgink

Gawd
Joined
Mar 8, 2001
Messages
665
Has anyone noticed in Firefox 4.0 with the new drivers that the text and browser components are fuzzy and have graphical issues?

I have Cleartype enabled, and the Catalyst settings for AMD/ATI are no different from previous drivers. It isn't with just Hardocp's page, it is every website.

I'm running Win7 64bit, AMD 6850

wtf1.jpg
 
Comparing IE, Chrome and Firefox I can definitely see a difference in the text in Firefox. It's almost like the text in Firefox is slightly bolded. I didn't check what it looked like before 11.4 so I can't say whether its a new issue or not.
 
Looks like you have Morphological AA enabled in the drivers. Firefox now hardware accelerates all 2D rendering so MLAA will blur the hell out of everything.
 
SicKlown42012 said:
Looks like you have Morphological AA enabled in the drivers. Firefox now hardware accelerates all 2D rendering so MLAA will blur the hell out of everything.
Click to expand...

d00d! I love you!

That was it! Thanks a bunch!! I was getting headaches after installing the 11.4's..

I'll have to keep an eye on that setting to make sure it doesn't do that again in future updates.
 
yeah, looks like MLAA. I haven't noticed any change in text with the new drivers at all.

Oops, it was the answer, just too slow!! :)
 
Last edited:
I was getting this in the previous driver as well once firefox 4 was released. This was withOUT having morphological AA enabled. Disabling hardware acceleration fixed it. Anyone else have this issue? And do the new drivers fix it?
 
I don't have MLAA enabled. I'll try disabling hardware acceleration and see if it makes any difference.
 
Well, if you disable hardware acceleration, that will effectively disable MLAA from being applied to the browser. I would bet you have it enabled inadvertently, because the screenshot above is CLEARLY MLAA.
 
I had this problem after my friend wanted to run a quake3 based game for the lulz on my 2600k/6950 system just to see how good it could look with everything forced on. It drove me nuts with the text like that. I ended up turning everything back to "application specific" settings, but I did have to restart firefox as well, and then it all went away.
 
mrrogers747 said:
I was getting this in the previous driver as well once firefox 4 was released. This was withOUT having morphological AA enabled. Disabling hardware acceleration fixed it. Anyone else have this issue? And do the new drivers fix it?
Click to expand...

[H]ocusPocus;1037181279 said:
I don't have MLAA enabled. I'll try disabling hardware acceleration and see if it makes any difference.
Click to expand...


Use this add-on to tweak font rendering in Firefox. It'll allow you to keep hardware acceleration and benefit from it.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/anti-aliasing-tuner/?src=api
 
I actually downgraded back to Firefox 3.6 because Firefox 4 had fuzzy text in certain situations, not everything was fuzzy, but gmail chat boxes and a few other things were fuzzy as if the text pixels were shifted 1/4 of a pixel left or right to no longer line up with the monitor pixels. Well that wasn't the only reason I downgraded, there were a few.
 
Tudz said:
I actually downgraded back to Firefox 3.6 because Firefox 4 had fuzzy text in certain situations, not everything was fuzzy, but gmail chat boxes and a few other things were fuzzy as if the text pixels were shifted 1/4 of a pixel left or right to no longer line up with the monitor pixels. Well that wasn't the only reason I downgraded, there were a few.
Click to expand...

You're not the only one. While I like the hardware acceleration (comes in handy in heavy duty pic sites), my Norton Identity Safe Card and Login wouldn't work with Firefox 4. I didn't have any issues with the text in 4, as it seemed fine to me, but I did notice that some sites displayed text a little bit differently in 4 compared to 3.
 
SicKlown42012 said:
Looks like you have Morphological AA enabled in the drivers. Firefox now hardware accelerates all 2D rendering so MLAA will blur the hell out of everything.
Click to expand...

Thanks! I've noticed this issue in several program (mainly Blackberry Desktop Software) and it's been really annoying. Didn't realize MLAA was to blame until I saw this thread.
 
4330thgink said:
d00d! I love you!
That was it! Thanks a bunch!! I was getting headaches after installing the 11.4's..
Click to expand...

This doesn't add up. Morphological Filtering does not show up in screenshots, so how could that have been the problem given that we could see the blurriness in the screen shot you posted?
 
SicKlown42012 said:
It will show up if you use the Snip tool.
Click to expand...
I didn't know that. Well, I'm having the same (or maybe just similar) problem, as shown here. But, I took the screen shot with the Print Screen key - no snip tool. The blurring only happens in accelerated windows. Notice that Chrome and Control panel (and the task bar) look fine, while Firefox 4 and Windows Live Mesh look awful.
 
Turn off hardware accel in firefox and it should go away. I cant find a reason to use hardware acceleration in firefox.
 
tangoseal said:
Turn off hardware accel in firefox and it should go away. I cant find a reason to use hardware acceleration in firefox.
Click to expand...
Yes, that will fix Firefox. As the screen shot shows, though, Firefox isn't the only window that uses direct draw. It would be nicer if things just worked properly instead of having to do a workaround that only fixes one particular program.
 
I've had similar issues with Adobe Acrobat 9.1.3 where the text just blurs.
(Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_profilepage&v=ZY0AnxgNOQo)

Apparently Morphological AA affects hardware accelerated software like Acrobat, Firefox and other programs.

So far, it seems Adobe fixed that issue in later versions of Acrobat (9.2+ I believe). It's possible that they fixed Acrobat so that it isn't affected by anti-aliasing done by the video cards. It is odd though-- Adobe Photoshop CS4 & CS5 is not affected at all by AA done by the video cards for as long as they had hardware acceleration in that software. (Maybe different development teams... who knows? lol)

Therefore I'm thinking Mozilla would have to fix this issue as well the same way so FF4 isn't affected by it at all. IE9 and Chrome so far are not affected by external AA by the video card/video card drivers. I have not seen that issue pop up since I've used either browsers.

The fix for me previously was to do either one of the following:
1.) Disable Morph AA.
2.) Let application decide in Catalyst.
3.) Disable hardware acceleration in the preferences.
 
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