It took two months but I finally got there.
Vivaldi now displays type normally though the browser interface is slightly messed up. But Iāll take good type display, thanks. On the MacType forums, a user in China called wmjordan was in the same boat but had found a solution. In their words:
For the recent version of Vivaldi 2.10, 2.11, you need to create a shortcut, and modify the command line, append the "--disable-lcd-text" parameter behind the executable name, and MacType will work on the web page content window. The "--disable-features=RendererCodeIntegrity" parameter is recommended by snowie2000.
I used the latter method, but the type was still quite poor for me. I had to do one more thing: start Vivaldi in Windows 8 compatibility mode.
Itās messed up the top of the browser a little but itās a small price to pay to have everything readable again.
Snowie2000, the main dev for MacType, says a registry hack is their preferred workaround, at github.com/snowie2000/mactype/wiki/Google-Chrome#workaround-for-chrome-78.
It turns out that Chrome 78 (and presumably Chromium 78, too) did indeed have a change: āStarting from Chrome 78, Chrome began to block third-party DLLs from injection. But they provided a way to disable the protection either from the command line or by policy.ā
I was right to have investigated which version of Vivaldi represented the change earlier (it was 2.9, which equated to Chromium 78). After testing wmjordanās suggestions out on 2.9, I upgraded to 2.11, and it was still fine. Opera GX is still the more resolved browser (works as it should out of the box) but there are some aspects of Vivaldi that Iām familiar with after two-and-a-half years (to the day). Looks like Iāll be going back to it for my main browsing, but I know Iāve found another great browser along the way, and Iāve updated my Firefox, too.
That was confusing. Yesterdayās blog post was representative of my thinking: given that certain people were upset when Chromium took away the Directwrite toggle in 2016, and type rendering on Chromium-based Vivaldi deteriorated significantly for me with v. 2.10 (it turns out v. 2.9 was the turning-point), then did Chromium only switch fully to Directwrite for me earlier this year? Luckily I wrote a caveat: āThereās a possibility that what I saw from 2017 actually was Directwrite, and whatever theyāre using now is yet another technology that no one has made any note of.ā
Snowie2000, one of the developers of MacType, suggested I try Cent Browser, arguably the only Chromium browser that still has a Directwrite toggle: you could still disable it in favour of GDI.
Cent Browser by default is marginally better than what I was seeing on Edge, Vivaldi 2.10 and others, but once I turned Directwrite off, I saw a very different display, with far heavier type.
Cent Browser, Directwrite switched off
Cent Browser, default
Edge
It wasnāt what I expected to see, and without taking issue with those who support GDI rendering in Chromium, it lacked fidelity (at least for me) with what the type looked like in print. I can see clearly why it has its adherents: it is superior to the default. But, in other words, what I experienced on Vivaldi between 2007 and January 2020 was using Directwrite, and whatever is going on now is using something else, or ignoring other settings on my PC.
Yesterday I theorized that if the change happened between Chromium 77 and 78, then I should see that in the source browser. I installed a v. 77 from the repository. As you know, these are stand-alone and can run without a full installation. What I saw was the inferior rendering, so the āswitchā didnāt happen then. It may have happened, as I was told on the Vivaldi forums, with Chromium 69, something I am yet to confirm.
Therefore, whatever Chromium is doing isnāt something thatās been documented, to my knowledge, except for here. And Opera and Opera GX, if they are based on Chromium 79, seem not to be afflicted by this bug. Or they are interacting with other programs I have in order to keep the type rendering faithful, with decent hinting and contrast.
The question is: what is causing the far inferior type display on Chromium today?
PS.: Trials on Chromium 68 and 69āthey’re the same (i.e. poor type display). This may have gone on for quite some time.āJY
After considerable searching, the bug that I reported to Vivaldi, and which they cannot reproduce, appears to be one that the general public encountered back in 2016, when Chromium took away the option to disable its Directwrite rendering. I donāt know why Iāve only encountered it in 2020, and as far as I can tell, my experience is unique.
Itās a good position to be inānot unlike being one of two people (that I know of) who could upload videos of over one minute to Instagram without using IGTVāthough itās a mystery why things have worked properly for me and no one else.
When I switched to Vivaldi in 2017, I noticed how the type rendering was superior compared with Firefox, and it was only in January this year when it became far inferior for me. Looking at the threads opened on type rendering and Chromium, and the screenshots posted with them, most experienced something like this in 2016āa year before I had adopted Vivaldi. If my PC worked as theirs did, then I doubt I would have been talking about Vivaldiās superior display.
There’s a possibility that what I saw from 2017 actually was Directwrite, and whatever they’re using now is yet another technology that no one has made any note of.
Iāve posted in the Vivaldi and MacType forums where this has been discussed, as my set-up could provide the clue on why things have worked for me and not others. Could it be my font substitutions, or the changes Iāve made to the default display types in Windows? Or the fact that I still have some Postscript fonts installed from the old days? Or something so simple as my plug-ins?
Tonight I removed Vivaldi 2.11 and went to 2.6. I know 2.5 rendered type properlyāBembo on the Lucire website looks like Bembo in printāso I wondered if I could narrow down the precise version where Vivaldi began to fail on this front. (As explained earlier, after 2.5, no automatic updates came, and I jumped from 2.5 to 2.10.)
It was 2.9 where the bug began, namely when Vivaldi moved from a Chromium 77 base to a 78 one. This is different to what Ayespy, a moderator on the Vivaldi forums, experienced: version 69 was when they noted a shift. Yet Opera GX, which works fine, has a browser ID that claims itās Chrome/79.0.3945.130 (though I realize they can put whatever they like here). Brave, Chrome and Edge look awful.
We can conclude that not all Chromium browsers are created equally (goes without saying) but I understand that the rendering isnāt something that each company (Vivaldi, Opera, etc.) has fiddled with. Therefore, something Iām doing is allowing me to have better results on Opera, Opera GX and Vivaldi versions up to 2.8 inclusive.
I wonder if itās time to return to Firefox after an absence of two years and five months. After getting the new monitor, the higher res makes Firefoxās and Opera GXās text rendering fairly similar (though Chrome, Vivaldi and Edge remain oddly poor, and Vivaldiās tech people havenāt been able to replicate my bug). Thereās a part of me that gravitates toward Firefox more than anything with a Google connection, and I imagine many Kiwis like backing underdogs.
Here are some examples, bearing in mind Windows scales up to 125 per cent on QHD.
Vivaldi (Chrome renders like this, too)
Opera GX (and how Vivaldi used to render)
Firefox
Opera renders text slightly more widely than Firefox, but the subpixel rendering of both browsers is similar, though not identical. Type in Firefox arguably comes across with slightly less contrast than it should (especially for traditionally paper-based type, where I have a good idea of how itās āsupposedā to look) but Iām willing to experiment to see if I enjoy the switch back.
In those 29 months, a lot has happened, with Navigational Sounds having vanished as an extension, and I had to get a new Speed Dial (FVD Speed Dial) to put on my favourite sites. FVD uninstalled itself earlier today without any intervention from me, so if that recurs, Iāll be switching to something else. I donāt like computer programs having a will of their own.
A lot of my saved passwords no longer work, since I change them from time to time, and it was interesting to see what Firefox remembered from my last period of regular use. Iāll have to import some bookmarks, tooāthat file has been going between computers since Netscape.
The big problem of 2017āFirefox eating through memory like crazy (6 Gbyte in a short time)ācould be fixed now in 2020 by turning off hardware acceleration. Itās actually using less right now than Opera GX, and thatās another point in its favour.
I also like the Facebook Container that keeps any trackers from Zuck and co. away.
I did, however, have to get new extensions after having resided in the Vivaldi and Opera space for all that time, such as Privacy Badger.
If I make Firefox the default I know Iāll have truly switched back. But that Opera GX sure is a good looking browser. I might have to look for some skins to make common-garden Firefox look smarter.
The Dell P2418D: just like the one I’m looking at as I type, but there are way more wires coming out of the thing in real life
Other than at the beginning of my personal computing experience (the early 1980s, and thatās not counting video game consoles), Iāve tended to have a screen thatās better than average. When 640 Ć 360 was the norm, I had 1,024 Ć 768. My first modern laptop in 2001 (a Dell Inspiron) had 1,600 pixels across, even back then. It was only in recent years that I thought my LG 23-inch LCD, which did full HD, was good enough, and I didnāt bother going to the extremes of 4K. However, with Lucire and the night-time hours I often work, and because of a scratch to the LG that a friend accidentally made when we moved, I thought it was time for an upgrade.
Blue light is a problem, and I needed something that would be easier on the eyes. At the same time, an upgrade on res would be nice.
But there was one catch: I wasnāt prepared to go to 27 inches. I didnāt see the point. I can only focus on so much at any given time, and I didnāt want a monitor so large that Iād have to move my neck heaps to see every corner. On our work Imacs I was pretty happy to work at 24 inches, so I decided Iād do the same for Windows, going up a single inch from where I was. IPS would be fine. I didnāt need a curved screen because my livelihood is in flat media. Finally, I don’t need multiple screens as I don’t need to keep an eye on, say, emails coming in on one screen, or do coding where I need one screen for the code and the other for the preview.
Oddly, there arenāt many monitor manufacturers doing QHD at 24 inches. There was a very narrow range I could choose from in New Zealand, with neither BenQ nor Viewsonic doing that size and resolution here. Asus has a beautifully designed unit but I was put off by the backlight bleed stories of four years ago that were put down to poor quality control, and it seemed to be a case of hit and miss; while Dellās P2418D seemed just right, its negative reviews on Amazon and the Dell website largely penned by one person writing multiple entries. I placed the order late one night, and Ascent dispatched it the following day. If not for the courier missing me by an hour, Iād be writing this review a day earlier.
I realize weāre only hours in to my ownership so there are no strange pixels or noticeable backlight bleed, and assembly and installation were a breeze, other than Windows 10 blocking the installation of one driver (necessitating the use of an elevated command prompt to open the driver executable).
With my new PC that was made roughly this time last year, I had a Radeon RX580 video card with two Displayport ports, so it was an easy farewell to DVI-D. The new cables came with the monitor. A lot of you will already be used to monitors acting as USB hubs with a downstream cable plugged in, though that is new to me. It does mean, finally, I have a more comfortable location for one of my external HDs, and I may yet relocate the cable to a third external round the back of my PC.
Windows 10 automatically sized everything to 125 per cent magnification, with a few programs needing that to be overridden (right-click on the program icon, then head into āCompatibilityā, then āChange high DPI settingsā).
Dellās Display Manager lets you in to brightness, contrast and other settings without fiddling with the hardware buttons, which is very handy. I did have to dial down the brightness and contrast considerably: Iām currently at 45 and 64 per cent respectively.
And I know itās just me and not the devices but everything feels faster. Surely I can’t be noticing the 1 ms difference between Displayport and DVI-D?
I can foresee this being far more productive than my old set-up, and Ascentās price made it particularly tempting. I can already see more of the in- and outbox detail in Eudora. Plantin looks great here in WordPerfect (which I often prep my long-form writing in), and if type looks good, Iām more inclined to keep working with it. (It never looked quite right at a lower res, though it renders beautifully on my laptop.)
I feel a little more ālate 2010sā than I did before, with the monitor now up to the tech of the desktop PC. Sure, itās not as razor-sharp as an Imac with a Retina 4K display, but I was happy enough in work situations with the QHD of a 15-inch Macbook Pro, and having that slightly larger feels right. Besides, a 4K monitor at this sizeāand Dell makes oneāwas outside what I had budgeted, and Iām not sure if I want to run some of my programsāthe ones that donāt use Windowsā magnificationāon a 4K screen. Some of their menus would become particularly tiny, and that wonāt be great for productivity.
Maybe when 4K becomes the norm Iāll reconsider, as the programs will have advanced by then, though at this rate Iāll still be using Eudora 7.1, as I do today.
Surprisingly, Vivaldi hadnāt notified me of any updates for monthsāI was on v. 2.05, and had no idea that they were up to 2.10. Having upgraded manually, I noticed its handling of type had deteriorated. Here is one paragraph in Lucire:
My font settings had also changed.
Coincidentally, I downloaded Opera GX last night to have a go, and it displays type in the way Iām used to:
Since both are Chromium-based, and Opera is sensitive about privacy as Vivaldi is, I decided to make the change and see if I like the new browser better. I was used to Operas of old being independent, not Chromium-based, but the good news is I could use the same plug-ins.
Iām missing Vivaldiās easy screenshot process and its clipping (Opera GX has something similar but introduces an extra step of saving the file) but so far the browsers arenāt too different in terms of everyday functionality. Opera GXās extensionsā window isnāt as well organized and I have to scroll to tinker with the settings of anything later in the alphabet.
The unchangeable dark theme takes a bit of getting used to (but it matches my laptop, so thereās that), and thereās a GX home page thatās superfluous for me.
I donāt need the built-in ad blocker out of principle, but I do have certain anti-tracking plug-ins (e.g. Privacy Badger) that I was able to install from the Opera shop without incompatibility.
Hard-core gamers may like the CPU limiter and RAM limiter, to make sure the browser doesnāt eat up capacity for their games. Itās not something I need concern myself about, but I can see it being handy. I remember when old Chrome (many years ago) and Firefox (more recently) began eating memory like crazy with my settings (no idea why), and this would have been useful.
But as someone who reads online a lot, itās important that type is properly handled. I donāt know what Vivaldi has done to its type rendering, and thatās probably the biggest thing that tipped me in favour of change.
Iāve found some forum entries about this, but they date back to the beginning of the decade. I alerted Jetstar to this in March, and the problem has worsened since then.
Basically, I canāt book online, and I donāt know why. Consequently, I booked one flight with Air New Zealand and only managed, after huge effort, to get the other (for a colleague) with Jetstar.
Back in March, I couldnāt book with Vivaldi, but I was able to switch to Firefox. I let Jetstar know.
Now, this strategy does not work.
Before you suggest it, cookies and caches have been cleared.
Hereās what happens after Iāve selected the cities and the dates, and I go to select times. Letās begin with Vivaldi on Windows, which is based on Chromium (which, as we know, is what Chrome, the browser Jetstar suggests you use, is based on):
Switching to Firefox now results in this:
Switching to Edge on the same PC gives this:
Fortunately, I also own Macs, so hereās what Firefox for Mac returns:
The only browser that works with the Jetstar website: Safari on Mac. As I’ve sold my Ubuntu laptop, I was unable to test using that OS.
Not many people would go to that effort, and while Jetstarās Twitter staff (after some pushing from me in DMs) said they would refer it on, I donāt expect anything to happen. Maybe Chrome would work, but Iām not ever going to download it to find out. Why invite Google on to your computer? But if that is the case, it seems foolish to limit yourself to such an invasive browser. My experience is that whatever is blocking me from booking with Jetstar (some may argue that this is a good thing), it is expanding across browsers.
You have to wonder if the online census this year has been intentionally bad so that the powers that be can call it a flop and use it as an excuse to delay online voting, thereby disenfranchising younger voters.
Itās the Sunday before the census and I await my access code: none was delivered, and I have three addresses at which this could be received (two entries to one dwelling, and a PO box). If itās not at any of these, then thatās pretty poor. I have been giving them a chance on the expectation it would arrive, but now this is highly unlikely.
And when you go to the website, they claim my browserās incompatible. I disagree, since Iām within the parameters they state.
This screen shot was taken after I filled out a request for the access code yesterday. Statistics NZ tells me the code will now take a week to arrive, four days after census night. Frankly, thatās not good enough.
While Iāve seen some TV commercials for the census, Iāve seen no online advertising for it, and nothing in social media. My other half has seen no TVCs for it.
Going up to the census people at the Newtown Fair today, I was handed a card with their telephone number and asked to call them tomorrow.
Youād think theyād have people there at the weekend when weāre thinking about these things. Letās hope I remember tomorrow.
And I’m someone who cares about my civic duty here. What about all those who don’t? Are we going to see a record population drop?
I’m not alone in this.
Same friends feeling disenfranchised for not having a computer. I understand reasons for online census but I think organisation and comms around it leave somewhat to be desired.
So how many people on NZ Twitter have or haven't received their letter yet for Tuesday's Census?
— Sarah Hendrica Bickerton 👩🏻💻 (@sarahhbickerton) March 3, 2018
and there are a lot of people among her circles, myself included, who donāt have the access code. Kat’s story is particularly interesting (edited for brevity):
Third call to Census NZ about getting a form for another dwelling on the property. This is specifically a question they talk about on the letter we got with our code, but operators are unable to issue extra codes. The request goes up to the supervisor.
When a field officer called around to give you a form, they sorted out issues like a second dwelling at the time, right there. They had authority to do so. They answered questions, and made sure you knew what you needed to do.
And I can't help but surmise that low socioeconomic communities are going to be the ones who: a) most likely won't have the time or inclination to fill in another bloody form for the government, let alone proactively pursue it b) need to be represented in the stats for funding
Online systems are robust and can be successful.
Itās just that they need to be backed up by people with a will to make things succeed, not people who are so intent on making them fail.
Earlier this week, I installed Vivaldi browser, and decided to make it my default after reading CEO Jon von Tetzchnerās blog post about the potentially corrupt practice of suspending his companyās Adwords campaign after he was critical of Google.
I have resisted browsers made from Chromium because I was never sure how much went back to Google, but seeing von Tetzchnerās honest blog post about Googleās alleged misdeed made me think that Vivaldi would likely look after my interests as a netizen.
It wasnāt the only reason, mind. Firefox, and before that, Cyberfox (a 64-bit Firefox that had been my default for quite some time) had begun eating memory on my computer. The memory leak would still happen after I got rid of many extensions, and even on safe mode, Firefox took up a lot more space than I expected. Firefox had been having issues with certain ads from some networks for months, too, resulting in script errors.
It didnāt take much time for Firefox to chew through 6 Gbyte, freezing other programs that I relied on, and crashing Windows altogether. It happened right after I installed a Crucial SSD that I bought from Atech Computers on Cuba Street, but fortunately I didnāt blame it on the new gadget. Logic prevailed and I discovered the culprit, though an upgrade to Universal Media Server didnāt help either: 6.7 is poorer than 6.5, confusing video files for JPEGs and forgetting what had been recently played. (Like Windows 10, which regularly forgets settings, modern software seems to have a memory poorer than its users.)
A screen shot of the Windows 10 Task Manager shows just how much memory Firefox ate in around 10 minutes, whereas at this point Vivaldi had been on for quite some time.
It mirrors the experience I once had with Chrome, which handled memory and web pages so poorly that I began calling it the āāAw, snap!ā browserā because of its regular crashes. The same problem that cemented my use of Firefox (and Waterfox and Cyberfox) has now happened to Firefox, forcing me to look for an alternative.
First indications are that Vivaldi is a well made product, with a built-in screen-shooting feature and notes. There are some things that are harder to get to, such as a menu where I can customize which cookies should be blocked (I like living in a YouTube-comment-less world; I feel my IQ is preserved as a result), but overall Iāve managed to get myself the right extensions to mimic what I used to do on Firefox. Iāve also switched off the Google phishing and malware protection setting, for obvious reasons, blocked a bunch of cookies from dodgy big US tech firms (Google among them), and done the ad opt-outs.
It might be marginally quicker, though if I was just interested in speed, Blaze beats Vivaldi and Firefox hands-down, and has a smaller memory footprint. However, a browser is not just for pleasure for me; if it were, then maybe this blog post would have been about another browser altogether. Iāve downloaded Blaze for my phone, and Iāll try it out soon.
I wonder if this is a longer-term change. I remember beginning surfing on Netscape 1, and if I recall correctly, 1Ā·2 had just come out so I actually began browsing in colour. Netscape stayed good till 4Ā·7, and 6 was bloatware and truly awful. I switched to Internet Explorer 5 at this point, before moving to Maxthon (when it had an IE core, but its own interface). Firefox had issues back then with typography, preventing me from switching, but as it matured to v. 3, I went over and wasnāt disappointed. Chrome also had typographic issues for a long time.
I invested a lot of time troubleshooting Firefox with the devs over the years, so I donāt make this move lightly. But there comes a point when a piece of software becomes impractical to keep. Firefox hadnāt changed much on the surface yet when it forces two hard resets a day, you have to make a hard call.
If it werenāt for von Tetzchnerās blog post, I mightnāt have made the decision to use his companyās browser quite so readily. But it is a good product, even at v. 1Ā·11. Vivaldi has obviously invested into making a decent browser from day one, and itās not just for technologists and power users, which some seem to think. The fact it works better than Firefox should automatically make it appealing to the bulk of users, and if its CEO isnāt afraid to call a spade a spade when it comes to Google, the general public should be impressed.
But, as weāve seen, an honourable stand doesnāt always mean success: Duck Duck Go hasnāt overtaken an increasingly suspect Google, and people still flock to Facebook for social networking despite that platformās privacy gaffes and unanswered questions about its forced downloads. I only hope that Vivaldi stays the course because the public deserves a product that hasnāt come from a morally questionable source.
Since the Firefox for Windows updates in November, I’ve had a big problem with the Mozilla browser, and the Waterfox 64-bit version based on it: they won’t display text. I had to downgrade to Waterfox 32.0.3 for the last month or so, but it’s begun crashing more and more regularly (from once a day to thrice todayāI visit largely the same sites, so why does software “decay” like this?).
On the latest incarnations of Firefox and Waterfox, linked fonts work, but the majority of system fonts vanished from the browser. And, for once, I’m not alone, if Bugzilla is any indication. It is probably related to a bug I filed in 2011.
I’ve had some very helpful people attend to the bug reportāit’s great when you get into Bugzilla where the programming experts resideābut sadly, a lot of the fixes require words. And, unfortunately, those are the things that no longer displayed in Firefox, not even in safe mode.
As many of you know, there’s no way I’d switch to Chrome (a.k.a. the ‘Aw, snap!’ browser) due to its frequent crashes on my set-up, and its memory hogging. There’s also that Google thing.
After some searching tonight, I came across Cyberfox. It’s not a Firefox alternative that comes up very often. Pale Moon is the one that a lot of people recommend, but I have become accustomed to Firefox’s Chrome-like minimalism, and wanted something that had a Firefox open-source back end to accompany it. Cyberfox, which lets you choose your UI, has the familiar Firefox Australis built in.
I made the switch. And all is well. Cyberfox forces you to make a new profile, something that Waterfox does not, but there isn’t much of an issue importing bookmarks (you have to surf to the directory where they are stored, and import the JSON file), and, of course, you have to get all your plug-ins and do all your opt-outs again. It also took me a while to program in my cookie blocks. But the important thing is: it displays text.
You’d think that was a pretty fundamental feature for a web browser.
The text rendering is different, and probably better. I’ve always preferred the way text is rendered on a Macintosh, so for Cyberfox to get a bit nearer that for some fonts is very positive. It took me by surprise, and my initial instinct was that the display was worse; on review, Firefox displayed EB Garamond, for example, in a slightly bitmapped fashion; Cyberfox’s antialiasing and subpixel rendering are better.
Firefox and Waterfox on Windows 7
Cyberfox on Windows 7
Here’s where the above text is from.
Gone is the support for the old PostScript Type 1 fonts (yes, I still have some installed) but that’s not a big deal when almost everything is TrueType and OpenType these days.
The fact Cyberfox works means one of two things: (a) Cyberfox handles typography differently; or (b) as Cyberfox forces us to have a new profile, then there is something in the old profiles that caused Firefox to display no text. That’s beyond my knowledge as a user, but, for now, my problems seem to be solvedāat least until someone breaks another feature in the future!
PS.: That lasted all of a few hours. On rebooting, Cyberfox does exactly the same thing. All my text has vanished, and the rendering of the type has changed to what Firefox and Waterfox do. No changes to the settings were made while the computer was turned off, since, well, that would be impossible. Whomever said computers were logical devices?
Of yesterday’s options, (a) is actually correctābut how do we get these browsers behaving the way they did in that situation? In addition, the PostScript Type 1 fonts that the browser was trying to access have since been replaced.
