Re: A property for font antialiasing control on Mac OS X

-webkit-font-smoothing was being heavily used well before icon fonts became a thing. Text is likely still the majority use-case for this feature today, by a wide margin. I agree this is a user preference the author should not be able to mess with, if only because it has a surprising large impact on any individual user and what they will prefer in this area is not so predictable.

From: Rik Cabanier <cabanier@gmail.com<mailto:cabanier@gmail.com>>
Date: Thursday, July 25, 2013 10:19 PM
To: John Daggett <jdaggett@mozilla.com<mailto:jdaggett@mozilla.com>>
Cc: "www-style@w3.org<mailto:www-style@w3.org>" <www-style@w3.org<mailto:www-style@w3.org>>
Subject: Re: A property for font antialiasing control on Mac OS X
Resent-From: <www-style@w3.org<mailto:www-style@w3.org>>
Resent-Date: Thursday, July 25, 2013 10:20 PM



On Thu, Jul 25, 2013 at 10:07 PM, John Daggett <jdaggett@mozilla.com<mailto:jdaggett@mozilla.com>> wrote:

Rik Cabanier wrote:

> I think most people wouldn't use this property to make text more legible.

There's a *huge* volume of pages surrounding the use of
'-webkit-font-smoothing', some insightful, some inane, but the bottom
line is that authors are using this to work around a deficiency of OSX
text rendering.  Not sure why you're asserting that it won't be used
to make text more legible.

I'm sure some will, but I believe that will be the minority.
On non-OSX platforms likely no one will since the font rendering is better there.


> WebKit and most likely all other browsers will drop subpixel
> anti-aliasing when a block of text is animated on the GPU. This
> causes a notable shift in the text's appearance which is not
> desired. This is especially obvious with transitions.

There are all sorts of conditions under which either a user agent or
the underlying OS will disable subpixel antialiasing.  I think the
shift you're seeing is more an implementation deficiency rather than
something that needs addressing via an explicit property.

Sure, but it's not something that will ever be fixed. (In fact, browsers are converging on this behavior)
So, authors that care about smooth transitions are going to want to this property. If we don't give them this ability, they will simply push all text to GPU accelerated layers which makes things slow and use more memory.