From a technical point of view I think it's the right approach to add the patch
because it makes Firefox behave like all the other apps on openSUSE and it's
font rendering can be modified by replacing the freetype library as it works
for every other application. Also recent cairo versions behave that way and
https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=682262
https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=682262#c3
--- Comment #3 from Wolfgang Rosenauer 2011-03-24 12:57:04 UTC ---
You are the first to report it that way. The change was a fix for another
report.
Ok, a bit of clarification about the situation.
The internally used cairo version already has some kind of subpixel rendering
apparently. That was fixed(1) upstream and is not anymore in the system cairo
package we ship.
(1) there was a discussion for several years to remove that and use a freetype
api instead which was finally done in cairo
Now Firefox should behave exactly as any other application in openSUSE 11.4
using the system cairo library for font rendering which was not true before.
For legal reasons (while there is discussion if that's really true) our
freetype does not support subpixel rendering and therefore normal antialiasing
is used.
People who use a subpixel enabled freetype are reporting that Firefox' font
rendering looks perfect now (please note that this is a subjective statement
always).
The subpixel algorithm used in the internal cairo (before the patch) is said to
be suboptimal. Also see
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=404637
they will end up in Firefox anyway at some point.
Actually and unfortunately we cannot have both. So it's a build time option and
can be avoided by not applying the cairo-lcd-filter patch.
While your mileage migh vary I thought it would be the right thing to patch it
(we had that patch already for the 3.x series of Firefox).
--
Configure bugmail: https://bugzilla.novell.com/userprefs.cgi?tab=email
------- You are receiving this mail because: -------
You are on the CC list for the bug.