

Chrome 37 Beta: DirectWrite on Windows and the Dialog Element - frankacter
http://blog.chromium.org/2014/07/chrome-37-beta-directwrite-on-windows.html

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pedrow
I was surprised to see that DirectWrite was introduced to Firefox version 4
back in 2010 [0] - though the release notes don't seem to mention it
explicitly [1]

[0]:[http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?t=1775755](http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?t=1775755)

[1]:[http://website-
archive.mozilla.org/www.mozilla.org/firefox_r...](http://website-
archive.mozilla.org/www.mozilla.org/firefox_releasenotes/en-
US/firefox/4.0/releasenotes/)

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rossy
This is great. Finally web fonts and icon fonts don't look terrible on
Windows/Chrome. I'm using Chrome Canary to test, and you can really see the
difference on Google Fonts and the Font Awesome homepage. GDI with ClearType
only does anti-aliasing in the x-direction, so the tops of letters like G and
Q look pretty blocky in Chrome stable. With DirectWrite they look perfect.

~~~
signal11
I've been using DirectWrite on Canary as well, and its a huge improvement.
Some may even like Chrome's DirectWrite implementation over IE11's, which
tends to produce really thick letters for some reason. Here's the same text
rendered in IE11, Firefox and Chrome (on Windows 7) --
[http://i.imgur.com/pOUJlHE.png](http://i.imgur.com/pOUJlHE.png)

~~~
swah
And Firefox rendering here seems kinda green, right?

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hayksaakian
More interestingly for me, the web crypto api has been enabled by default.

~~~
DCKing
It's nice for speed and the fact that you don't need to use a library any
more, bit isn't more secure than JS Crypto was before.

~~~
acdha
> It's nice for speed and the fact that you don't need to use a library any
> more, bit isn't more secure than JS Crypto was before.

It's a significant improvement in one area: the key storage API. If you use
JavaScript crypto, your keys can be read by an attacker who can compromise
that code in some way. WebCrypto can't stop that attacker from signing,
encrypting or decrypting a message which the attacker has access to but it
does prevent the key leaking out, which is often a far more catastrophic
event.

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nanexcool
Lately I've found myself using Firefox more and more. The last couple of weeks
Chrome and Canary have been hanging a lot, especially when I want to download
a file. Chrome will slow to a crawl, tabs will stop rendering and when I try
to close it thinks it's still downloading something.

As someone who's been using Chrome since the first public release I wish it
were a bit more stable (for me at least).

~~~
aen0
Check your antivirus.

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zebracanevra
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm pretty sure this has been in Chrome Beta for
at least 2 or 3 months - it was hidden in chrome://flags

~~~
rossy
This is true. I've been using it for a while, but it's great to see it
switched on by default. Hopefully more designers will be able to use web fonts
without having to worry about how it looks in Chrome/Windows (probably the
most popular browser/operating system combination.)

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lcnmrn
Chrome 38 release for Mac on dev channel is now 64-bit.

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politician
The support for the dialog element is great, but is it a bug that the
scrolling example scrolls the entire page (and moves the dialog offscreen)
when the inner scroll bar hits the bottom of the div? Or is that just a
limitation of the polyfill?

~~~
anon4
That's how scrolling inner elements works in all browsers.

~~~
politician
It sort of defeats the purpose of a centered modal dialog...

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AjithAntony
FWIW, This looks terrible for my jenkins logs:

    
    
        font-family: monospace;
    

[http://i.imgur.com/da3TbE8.png](http://i.imgur.com/da3TbE8.png)

~~~
kuschku
That's because the font you're using is set to render without antialiasing –
the old system just rendered everything larger and then scaled down
(supersampling), while the new system actually uses real antialiasing and only
when the flag is set.

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seanmcdirmid
Is it me, or is the text using DirectWrite (in 37) much worse than the text
using the manual renderer (in 36)? The harshness of the renderer is one reason
I prefer Chrome over IE.

~~~
ivanche
Oh no, it's not you. I say that _without_ DirectWrite font looks nice and
smooth. With DirectWrite it's broken, it looks like some Win 3.11 font without
anti aliasing. Just look at letter w - you can see pixels forming diagonal
lines. And bottom row with grey letters is almost unreadable.﻿

Edit: I was referring to screenshot shown in article, not to DirectWrite in
general.

~~~
kuschku
If you look at the screenshot at 1:1 resolution
[http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-4mueYYHRq8I/U8g3U-bk26I/AAAAAAAAAU...](http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-4mueYYHRq8I/U8g3U-bk26I/AAAAAAAAAUM/4b50Cr2bgIA/s1600/directwrite-
comparison.png) you can clearly see that the old renderer is blurry and hard
to read, while the new one is crisp and looks much better.

~~~
ivanche
I'm sorry but I still don't share your opinion, even after looking at 1:1
screenshot. Just look at the 'crisp' letter w - for me it's not crisp, it's
jagged. I can clearly see vertical line after vertical line (offset to the
right), trying to make diagonal lines which constitute the letter. In
contrast, "old" style w looks very smooth, much closer to what one would write
by hand. Also look at the top of the curve in letter e - it is actually not a
curve at all but a horizontal line which stands out.

~~~
jcrawfordor
Pretty sure you have a subpixel order difference or something then - as
previously mentioned, screenshots are not the way to compare.

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rnnr
The really great thing is that this ends the GDI exhaustion problem. Chrome in
Windows could easily kneel systems of users who opened many tabs.

