Microsoft has made changes to Chromium that will improve text display on Windows computers. Chrome version 124 will support contrast and gamma values from Windows ClearType Text Tuner for displaying text in Google’s browser, The Verge reports.
This means that Chrome will finally match the improvements that Microsoft has made to Edge’s font and text display. So users will be able to apply text contrast enhancements and gamma correction to improve the readability of text on web pages.
Microsoft’s ClearType font technology has long been used in Windows to enhance the display of text on the screen, making it look like it was printed on a piece of paper.
Like many other Windows applications, Microsoft Edge uses the DirectWrite framework to render glyphs on the screen. The advantage of using DirectWrite is that it keeps certain system-wide user settings consistent and uses the same rendering pipeline for all other built-in Windows applications.
Chromium, on the other hand, uses DirectWrite only for part of the text rendering pipeline: enumerating fonts, retrieving glyph information, and generating glyph bitmaps. It handles the actual text generation, layout, and rendering. This makes it possible to reuse the code on different platforms, but on Windows, the results are usually different from the rest of the system text rendering.
Chrome uses Skia to display text with hard-coded contrast and gamma values, so it hasn’t taken advantage of the improvements that ClearType has to offer.
Microsoft helped Chrome by making Skia capable of selecting and applying ClearType Text Tuner settings.
These changes are part of Microsoft’s commitment to improving Chromium-based browsers on Windows after the company switched to Chromium in its own Edge browser more than five years ago.
At the time, Microsoft said it would use its experience with the Windows platform to improve the experience of all Chromium-based browsers on Windows. Microsoft has helped improve Chrome’s scrolling, touch control support, and more.
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