Personal blog of Seph Soliman Thoughts, Tinkerings and Tips

Text rendering bug in Firefox 2 on Mac

A long standing bug that's been bugging me is the font rendering in Firefox 2 on Mac OS X. The issue is that text smoothing/antialiasing is too heavy and causes fonts to become "fat"/unreadable.

Installing Firefox 3.0 I stumbled upon an article that described this exact problem and had a solution! Oh joy!

The solution

The fix the issue, apply the CSS 3 property, opacity, to the body tag, and set it to 0.99999. I recommend using the -moz-opacity attribute, which is standards compliant and only affects mozilla-based browsers like this:


body { -moz-opacity: .99999; }


But please read the rest of the article since there might be a few side effects. The fix should only be applied when the user agent reports to be Firefox 2 on Mac.