Vadauco, thanks for the validating reply as I totally agree on the blurry text eye strain BUG in FF18 as show in my two screen shots at the bottom of Page 4.

FF-DevTeam, like other users have posted above, please know that I, too, have:

1) Disabled the Win7 ClearType feature when the OS was first installed the other week prior to upgrading from FF17 to FF18;

2) Have set gfx.content.azure.enabled = False; and,

3) Have set gfx.direct2d.disabled = True.

Unfortunately, none of those ideas resolved the issue that did not exist in FF17 prior to updating the other day.

Therefore, I just finished restoring the pre-FF18 Acronis backup image with FF17.0.1 to the disk and this FF18 fuzzy text display bug NO longer exists. :)

Like Vadauco, I'm gonna stick with FF17 until this ongoing bug issue is resolved, once and for all.

Sure would appreciate your reply back on this. Thanks so very much.

Bill, Database Software Engineer... Without much HTML / CSS expertise. :)

Fellow Users and FF-DevTeam:

Please keep in mind that I do not have much HTML~CSS nor hardware expertise as I'm a software database tech and am a 2-week old FF rookie.

In follow up to my previous posts and restoring the disk back to the Jan 8th image in order to "rollback" to FF17, I just stumbled into a possible cause of this fuzzy text display "bug" while confirming all prior FF17 User Preference Settings in this new Win7-64 custom installation build on an Intel i7 Chip & MBoard that was not "seen" before herein nor was it known to look for...

In the Tools / Options / Advanced / General Tab, it was noticed that the FF17 install had the "Use Hardware Acceleration When Available" box checked, which was not recalled being checked when configuring FF18 yesterday. For grins, I unchecked the box, stopped and restarted FF17 and, sure enough, the blasted fuzzy text problem instantly returned. Upon rechecking that config setting box and restarting FF17, the fuzzy text issue went away.

Until FF-DevTeam and/or other users please kindly confirm this finding, FF17 will continue to be used just in case something else is going on "under the hood."

Hope this helps and sure would appreciate your feedback on this.

Thanks so much.

i'm finding this issue in Linux Mint: FF 18.0 Linux Mint 12 ATI HD4870, proprietary drivers

Disabling hardware acceleration doesn't fix the problem

I'm having the problem too. Didn't exist on FF17. I had hardware acceleration disabled, but I tried enabling it and it didn't make a difference. I'm back to using it disabled and still the same thing. I'm using XP on a laptop with Intel X3100 integrated graphics.

Just upgraded from FF esr 10 to esr 17 and got the same problem.

I am on w7 64 with an ATI Radeon HD2400 Pro.

Setting gfx.direct2d.disabled = True brought some relief but the font still is not as good as it was with esr 10.

I'm glad I found the fix though because without it the blurry font I got with direct2d enabled would have made me revert to esr 10.

I wonder why even after more than 2 months since this font problem has been reported there is still no real fix for it.

I am using Firefox 18 on an HP (Pavilion dv6) laptop, on Windows 7 Professional. This DEGRADED FONT issue is NOT resolved by ANY of the "fixes" offered above. I have tried them all: changing gfx.direct2d.disabled to true; turning off hardware acceleration; ETC. This is an issue that should be DEFINITIVELY DEALT WITH by the Mozilla development team. leaving this to "...try this, try that.." approach is unacceptable. This is an issue that affects millions of users. "Trying" to fix the problem by changing some about:config settings is not the answer. If someone has a DEFINITIVE, TESTED SOLUTION, I'd sure like to know what it is.

Hey dude, can't say it's really a fix, but I started using Pale Moon and things just got a lot better. Firefox is becoming all messed up.

02/16/2013 at 12:30 PM: alulaq2 said:

"This DEGRADED FONT issue is NOT resolved by ANY of the "fixes" offered above. I have tried them all: changing gfx.direct2d.disabled to true; turning off hardware acceleration; ETC. This is an issue that should be DEFINITIVELY DEALT WITH by the Mozilla development team. leaving this to "...try this, try that.." approach is unacceptable. This is an issue that affects millions of users. "Trying" to fix the problem by changing some about:config settings is not the answer. If someone has a DEFINITIVE, TESTED SOLUTION, I'd sure like to know what it is."

TOTALLY AGREE! This topic is now on page 5 going back to November 2012. Many users have contributed excellent comments on what they have tried to do to resolve this... TO NO AVAIL!

Frankly, the failure of the Mozilla DevTeam to resolve this bug for over 3.5 months does not align with Mozilla's outstanding, worldwide browser reputation.

What's up with that?

Why won't you respond back to your dedicated users who have taken the time to assist you with your "offsite, QA testing?"

Respectfully,

Bill, CRM/ERP Database Engineer

Resetting Firefox seems to have fixed the issue for me. Note, I experienced the issue even in FF19 (at least until i reset Firefox).

To reset Firefox go to Help -> Troubleshooting Information -> Reset Firefox.

Prior to resetting Firefox the issue appeared to be triggered on my system from version 17 when:

1) hardware acceleration was enabled; and, 2) the bookmarks side bar was open.

Is this the same issue as what I'm experiencing? I get pixelated text when I visit a page or scroll around. Hovering over links or scrolling content out of view fixes it temporarily.

It seemed to happen after I updated my Windows 7 recently. Turning off hardware acceleration in Firefox makes it stop, but I want it on.

Firefox 19 and Windows 7 x64 SP1

Yes this sounds like the same issue I experienced. Resetting Firefox seemed to rid this problem mostly for me. It has occurred again once on a particular random web that I visited.

The other web pages that I frequented regularly that were problematic seem to be ok after resetting Firefox for me.

I had a similar problem and using this settings i fixed it:

• gfx.downloadable_fonts.enabled = false
• gfx.direct2d.disabled = true

You can set this values in "about:config" page

@denbkh - gfx.downloadable_fonts.enabled = false - this solved the fonts problem in my case. thx

Does gfx.downloadable_fonts.enabled deal with @font-face? Are web fonts the cause of the pixelation?

There is usually no need to disable downloadable fonts by setting gfx.downloadable_fonts.enabled=false and disable fonts downloaded via @font-face rules.

You can try to set the gfx.content.azure.enabled pref to false or if this didn't help disable Direct2D by setting the gfx.direct2d.disabled pref to true on the about:config page and leave hardware acceleration otherwise enabled.

The direct2d setting made all my fonts in firefox crappy (before it was just in webpages and afterwards even the font in the tabs was bad)...

But I'm kinda unsure about it all, because I do have NoScript installed and this can block fonts as well... So I guess there ain't one right solution for everyone. Just for me the downloadable_fonts switch was doing the trick.

@gavisu: And yes it seems to deal with @font-face, because after i disabled it in mozilla, NoScript didn't have to block it anymore -> @font-face was previously blocked my firefox (at least imho).

I replied in another thread but this might be more active for responses.

I have a win7, i7 first gen on an HP and this blurry font issue started about a ten days or so ago when I let Firefox auto update me to v 19.0.2.

So far it has only happened on Google sites, especially google news. The fonts load clear, but when I (edit) mouse over a news story the text blurs. Selecting the text in the news stories temporarily fixes the blurred fonts, but the blurring starts up again as I mouse over any stories again.

As I mentioned in the other thread, I installed a new Epson printer about the same time this blurred font issue popped up and thought maybe some of the OCR or other software installed with the printer caused the problem. But these forums indicate it is widespread, so it may not be the Epson software after all.

I have only seen this on Google sites, and it will do it every time on the Google news page.

Updated: I tried to use the snipping tool to post a picture here, but I have discovered that activating the snipping tools fixes the blurred fonts much like selecting the text does!!!! For the attached image of the blurred fonts I had to use the print screen method to capture the image.

Note that I did not mouse over the first two stories in the image and the fonts are clear, but the others blurred when I moved the cursor over them!

ricktay's screen shot sums it up. Firefox font rendering is completely broken, making the browser completely unusable.

https://support.cdn.mozilla.net/media/uploads/images/2013-03-09-19-04-19-408a7f.png

Set gfx.content.azure.enabled to false in about:config

The problem has yet to resurface for me.