Is there any "font smoothing" in Google Chrome?

Question

I'm using google webfonts and they fine at super large font sizes, but at 18px, they look awful. I've read here and there that there are solutions for font smoothing, but I haven't found any where that explains it clearly and the few snippets I have found don't work at all.

My h4 looks awful in pretty much every browser, but Chrome is the worst. In Chrome, pretty much all of my fonts look terrible.

Can anyone point me in the right direction? Perhaps you know of a resource that explains this clearly? Thanks!

EXAMPLE SCREENSHOT #1

This screenshot shows the homepage of https://www.dartlang.org/, a programming language that is made by Google (so we can imply that this website is also build by Google) and uses Google Webfonts.

Screenshot shows Google Chrome on the left, Firefox/Internet Explorer on the right.:

EXAMPLE SCREENSHOT #2

This screenshot shows a product info page on Adobe.com, using webfonts provided by Typekit. Adobe & Typekit are professionals when it comes to fonts.

Screenshot shows Google Chrome on the right, Firefox/Internet Explorer on the left:

Divisible

they look good to me in chrome and firefox ... could you add a printscreen? – Hawks

Also on iPhone/iOS they look very good. – Anastase

Are you using Windows? If so, the OS's ClearType smoothing engine might be the cause. I've tried that page out in Mac OS, Ubuntu, Fedora, and Chrome OS in addition to Windows; the latter being the only one which doesn't render properly, because of what I suspect is the ClearType engine. – Hastate

yes it's windows. Do you know what I can do about it? – Divisible

just discovered this useful feature: chrome://flags/#lcd-text-aa - enable it and it smooths text for you – Platino

Answer 1

Status of the issue, June 2014: Fixed with Chrome 37

Finally, the Chrome team will release a fix for this issue with Chrome 37 which will be released to public in July 2014. See example comparison of current stable Chrome 35 and latest Chrome 37 (early development preview) here:

Status of the issue, December 2013

1.) There is NO proper solution when loading fonts via @import, <link href= or Google's webfont.js. The problem is that Chrome simply requests .woff files from Google's API which render horribly. Surprisingly all other font file types render beautifully. However, there are some CSS tricks that will "smoothen" the rendered font a little bit, you'll find the workaround(s) deeper in this answer.

2.) There IS a real solution for this when self-hosting the fonts, first posted by Jaime Fernandez in another answer on this Stackoverflow page, which fixes this issue by loading web fonts in a special order. I would feel bad to simply copy his excellent answer, so please have a look there. There is also an (unproven) solution that recommends using only TTF/OTF fonts as they are now supported by nearly all browsers.

3.) The Google Chrome developer team works on that issue. As there have been several huge changes in the rendering engine there's obviously something in progress.

I've written a large blog post on that issue, feel free to have a look: How to fix the ugly font rendering in Google Chrome

Reproduceable examples

See how the example from the initial question look today, in Chrome 29:

POSITIVE EXAMPLE:

Left: Firefox 23, right: Chrome 29

POSITIVE EXAMPLE:

Top: Firefox 23, bottom: Chrome 29

NEGATIVE EXAMPLE: Chrome 30

NEGATIVE EXAMPLE: Chrome 29

Solution

Fixing the above screenshot with -webkit-text-stroke:

First row is default, second has:

-webkit-text-stroke: 0.3px;

Third row has:

-webkit-text-stroke: 0.6px;

So, the way to fix those fonts is simply giving them

-webkit-text-stroke: 0.Xpx;

or the RGBa syntax (by nezroy, found in the comments! Thanks!)

-webkit-text-stroke: 1px rgba(0,0,0,0.1)

There's also an outdated possibility: Give the text a simple (fake) shadow:

text-shadow: #fff 0px 1px 1px;

RGBa solution (found in Jasper Espejo's blog):

text-shadow: 0 0 1px rgba(51,51,51,0.2);

I made a blog post on this:

If you want to be updated on this issue, have a look on the according blog post: How to fix the ugly font rendering in Google Chrome. I'll post news if there're news on this.

My original answer:

This is a big bug in Google Chrome and the Google Chrome Team does know about this, see the official bug report here. Currently, in May 2013, even 11 months after the bug was reported, it's not solved. It's a strange thing that the only browser that messes up Google Webfonts is Google's own browser Chrome (!). But there's a simple workaround that will fix the problem, please see below for the solution.

STATEMENT FROM GOOGLE CHROME DEVELOPMENT TEAM, MAY 2013

Official statement in the bug report comments:

Our Windows font rendering is actively being worked on. ... We hope to have something within a milestone or two that developers can start playing with. How fast it goes to stable is, as always, all about how fast we can root out and burn down any regressions.

Travel

The problem is not in all the browsers running on Windows, it's just in the case of Chrome. Firefox, Opera and IE have proper anti-aliasing of the fonts. Although, it can be fixed in chrome by using -webkit-font-smoothing property. See my answer below. – Boutin

For black text, I used text-shadow: #333 0px 0px 1px;. Thanks a lot for the tip. – Stepp

Maybe it got lost in translation but -webkit-text-stroke only works when you use an alpha of the color of the font. So for a black font I use something like "-webkit-text-stroke: 1px rgba(0,0,0,0.1)". – Highpitched

I've noticed that Chrome 30 on Mac is now exhibiting the same lack of antialiasing. – Broth

@Broth Can you give more info (screenshots etc.) ? – Travel

@Panique I just updated to Chrome 31 which is no longer exhibiting it. If I get another machine on 30 I'll grab a screen shot – Broth

I had a similar problem on Kubuntu; it had to do with Chrome being the only browser that I had that actually respected the system-level "font antialiasing" setting. I had turned it off years ago when I had a really bad video card and never bothered turned it back on. Turning on system-level antialiasing fixed the problem for me. See this page for a similar story. – Cardoon

@Broth Using Chrome 32.0.1700.107 m in Windows 8 x64, and it is still exhibiting the unwanted aliasing behavior. – Trici

@Trici Read the article. – Travel

In the official ticket on the chrome board for this issue code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=137692 it seems to be aimed as fix for v37, if I've undrestand correctly the last post in the thread. – Cravens

Since v52 or so they removed GDI rendering, which causes blurry fonts (I think due to "direct write" - whatever this is...). The Patch was made only by one or two people and they refuse to change it back. Blurry text everywhere - nearly unreadable. Even in the newest version. Like they are blind or so. Our customers complain. This is 2017... – Earful

Answer 2

I had the same problem, and I found the solution in this post of Sam Goddard,

The solution if to defined the call to the font twice. First as it is recommended, to be used for all the browsers, and after a particular call only for Chrome with a special media query:

@font-face {
  font-family: 'chunk-webfont';
  src: url('../../includes/fonts/chunk-webfont.eot');
  src: url('../../includes/fonts/chunk-webfont.eot?#iefix') format('eot'),
  url('../../includes/fonts/chunk-webfont.woff') format('woff'),
  url('../../includes/fonts/chunk-webfont.ttf') format('truetype'),
  url('../../includes/fonts/chunk-webfont.svg') format('svg');
  font-weight: normal;
  font-style: normal;
}

@media screen and (-webkit-min-device-pixel-ratio:0) {
  @font-face {
    font-family: 'chunk-webfont';
    src: url('../../includes/fonts/chunk-webfont.svg') format('svg');
  }
}

With this method the font will render good in all browsers. The only negative point that I found is that the font file is also downloaded twice.

You can find an spanish version of this article in my page

Precancel

This is actually the correct answer, however it can be simplified. Simply listing the SVG version FIRST in the list of fonts solves the issue too! – Pusher

This answer gives — by far — the best results. The SVG font looks x100 better than the -webkit-text-stroke hack. The main downside is the font-size of the SVG version; it's normally much bigger :-( Google really needs to get this sorted a.s.a.p. – Chiles

I totally agree ! I'll link to this answer from within my answer. – Travel

@Pusher Listing the SVG first is not advisable — this means the SVG font will be loaded by every single browser that supports it, while you just need it for Chrome on Windows. – Interpellation

@Pusher The two main culprits are no hinting support and the large filesize (gzip compression for fonts is not enabled by default on many server). – Interpellation

Chrome no longer supports svg fonts as of chrome 38 – Schenk

Answer 3

Chrome doesn't render the fonts like Firefox or any other browser does. This is generally a problem in Chrome running on Windows only. If you want to make the fonts smooth, use the -webkit-font-smoothing property on yer h4 tags like this.

h4 {
    -webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased;
}

You can also use subpixel-antialiased, this will give you different type of smoothing (making the text a little blurry/shadowed). However, you will need a nightly version to see the effects. You can learn more about font smoothing here.

Boutin

I have latest version Chrome today 8-feb-2013 and this page here shows no difference between them maxvoltar.com/sandbox/fontsmoothing – Mamelon

This doesn't work (tested on windows). As mac's do this anyway I down marked to dissuade people from using it. – Navelwort

This does not work. I just tried it on Windows 8. With whatever the latest version of Chrome is (as of 10/8/2013). – Archer

On Mac Chrome and Safari this DOES work so it is worth adding. Apple.com even uses it in their base.css stylesheet: body { font: 12px/18px "Lucida Grande", "Lucida Sans Unicode", Helvetica, Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; -webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; } – Ascension

@Ascension they also seem to use Helvetica, Arial, and Verdana before sans-serif, which would show the best one one a given platform. – Highams

the firefox equivalent is -moz-osx-font-smoothing: grayscale; – Frogfish

Answer 4

Ok you can use this simply

-webkit-text-stroke-width: .7px;
-webkit-text-stroke-color: #34343b;
-webkit-font-smoothing:antialiased;

Make sure your text color and upper text-stroke-width must me same and that's it.

Cowbind

font smoothing no longer does anything but the text stroke works and can help on some fonts. I seemed to get best results with a 0.5px stroke and rgba(0,0,0,0.5). – Offcolor

the firefox equivalent is -moz-osx-font-smoothing: grayscale; – Frogfish

this is nice... just replace #34343b with inherit.. ;) – Aslam