Has font rendering changed?
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@Gwen-Dragon Thank you, sorry for the trouble.
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@jackyan That's why I said to use a Pastebin
But my bad, I should've asked for only the Feature Status part. The rest of the stuff is way too technical anyway, and too dependent on different GPUs and workarounds.But the settings at least are the same. For now I have no idea, I say just report it to the tracker.
FYI I had a look at the site in the other browsers I have installed, Opera, Firefox, (old) Edge - the font looks exactly the same on all browsers.
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@Pathduck I’ll do that tomorrow (the reporting). Thank you for walking me through this.
Interestingly, Firefox is quite different for me (always has been). I know this is academic (and as I wanted to show text that wasn’t the same as before) …
Opera (and a good proxy for Vivaldi 2.5):
Firefox
Vivaldi 2.10
For me, Firefox has always been a little heavier, slightly clunkier, which is fine for sans serif body types with low contrast, not so good with finer serif types. (Old) Vivaldi was always the best.
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@Gwen-Dragon Thank you!
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Hi everyone, an update (of sorts). The team was unable to reproduce this (unsurprisingly) but I found a bunch of threads about Chromium getting rid of the old rendering in favour of Directwrite four years ago. It looks very much like what I went through, but strangely, four years after everyone else, and on a much newer version of Vivaldi. I have to conclude I must have had a mixture of plug-ins that (possibly uniquely) did this, and since I have the same plug-ins on Opera GX, maybe it’s why that’s still rendering type correctly for me. I’ll experiment a bit more and come back with what I find. Vivaldi was still my preferred browser, hope to come back to it.
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Update: Directwrite isn’t the culprit, after doing these tests.
http://jackyan.com/blog/2020/03/directwrite-isnt-the-culprit/
It seems there’s something in Chromium that’s not interacting with the rest of Windows, whereas Opera’s still allowing it (using a Chromium 79 base, if the browser ID is accurate). More when I play with Chromium 68 and 69 (picking up on a suggestion from @Ayespy).
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Yay, finally found it! Turns out there was a change with Chrome 78.
https://github.com/snowie2000/mactype/wiki/Google-Chrome#workaround-for-chrome-78
I can’t see any registry entries for Vivaldi where they say the HKLM settings should be, but the --disable-features=RendererCodeIntegrity flag in the command line works, in addition to launching Vivaldi in compatibility mode for Windows 8. Now the type displays as it once did before v. 2.9. The browser design is a little messed up by running under Windows 8 but at least I can read everything more effortlessly.
Thank you to everyone who answered!
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@Gwen-Dragon Yep, adding that, and turning the compatibility mode to Windows 8, finally got the display to where it was on 2.5 (and up to 2.8). The type is much sharper and more faithful to how it would look in print now.
As to the registry values, I looked there but the only subdirectories under Policies are Adobe and Microsoft. I also tried opening regedit as admin, but it was the same, unless I’m doing something wrong or going to the wrong place:
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@Gwen-Dragon Oh, right, then that’ll explain why! I might experiment, see if it’s more efficient than doing it at the command line.
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Vivaldi's font rendering was always poor for me on Windows, both the GUI and sites.
(Same as other Chromium browsers, though I haven't used others recently.)Having to use extensions to try to improve it, or changing arcane Chromium flags, is quite unfortunate.
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