How to get font smoothing to work in Firefox under Linux?

Question

I'm using Arch Linux with KDE 4.6 and Firefox 5.0, and I had to install a GTK+ theme to make apps like Firefox look nicer.

Now, I have another problem—Firefox doesn't use font smoothing on sites, even though KDE itself uses font smoothing. I didn't see anything related to that in settings.

Answer 1

I've solved the problem by removing ttf-ms-fonts and ttf-vista-fonts and installing higher quality fonts (ttf-ubuntu-font-family and otf-texgyre) from the AUR.

Answer 2

Does the article Enable Smooth fonts on Ubuntu Linux apply to your case ?

It is also possible that your problem relates to Bug 660448 - Subpixel antialiasing too strong/incorrect everywhere, which was marked fixed on 2011-07-05. If so, then a future version of Firefox will fix the problem. You could also verify against Firefox Nightly Builds.

Answer 3

If it is indeed only happening on certain fonts, you can create a .fonts.conf file in your home directory with the following:

<fontconfig>
  <match target="font">
    <edit name="embeddedbitmap" mode="assign">
      <bool>false</bool>
    </edit>
  </match>
</fontconfig>

You may need to regenerate your font cache and/or restart X for this change to take effect.