You’d think that the web experience on your Windows 11 install is just confined to browsers, but you’d be surprised by how much stuff is web-based on your computer. Now, with a new change in Chromium, you’re about to notice some a small, but impactful, change to how Windows renders most fonts.
Chromium-based browsers on Windows, including Google Chrome, are receiving a significant upgrade to text rendering, resulting in sharper, clearer text that matches the quality of native Windows applications. This update comes as a part of Chromium 132 and directly addresses user feedback concerning text readability, particularly for lighter fonts and CJK (Chinese, Japanese, and Korean) characters.
If you need the technical fluff as to why web fonts were rendered differently from actual system fonts, this discrepancy stemmed from how Chromium utilized DirectWrite, a Windows text rendering API, only partially. It relied on its own system, Skia, for other parts of the rendering pipeline, leading to inconsistencies. Microsoft Edge, before its switch to Chromium, used DirectWrite exclusively, which meant consistent text rendering across the system. By increasing the contrast value to 1.0, the change makes text significantly more visible, especially in challenging scenarios like lightweight fonts or complex CJK characters.
The latest update brings Microsoft’s contrast enhancement and gamma correction technology from older Edge versions to the Chromium open-source project. Furthermore, the Windows ClearType Text Tuner, a tool that allows users to customize text rendering settings, will now also apply to Chromium-based browsers.
If this is a change in Chromium, why is it important for Windows at large? As it turns out, many Windows apps such as Discord, Slack, and others, are based on Electron, which is based on Chromium. Furthermore, pretty much all Windows web browsers that aren’t Firefox or based on Firefox (Edge, Vivaldi, Chrome, etc) are based on Chromium. So once the base for those browsers and Electron is updated to Chromium 132, all of those will also get the new font rendering changes. Some apps like the new Microsoft Teams and new Outlook are running on WebView2 on Windows, which is based on Edge, which is based on Chromium.
Source: Microsoft
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