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

On Thu, Jul 25, 2013 at 10:07 PM, John Daggett <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.