Enough with the font smoothing

Dani Rodríguez • 05 Jul 2018 • Permalink

I seriously condemn websites that change the font smoothing of blocks of text in their CSS styles. I seriously hate font-smoothing, -webkit-font-smoothing and -moz-osx-font-smoothing and I strongly believe that the world would be better if those goddamn’d properties didn’t exist. Ye, I understand that subpixel antialiasing doesn’t make sense on high DPI screens and that HDPI screens are usually better with grayscale scaling. But most websites change the aliasing in awful ways. Why can’t you apply a media query to only change the font smoothing on bigger displays? On my non-HDPI 1080p Dell display, grayscale antialiasing makes me want to rip off my eyes.

Here Twitter is applying grayscale smoothing because the media query has detected the screen as high DPI. Why can't you be more like Twitter?

I had Stylish installed on my web browser just so that I could force font smoothing to look as I wish. But the new owners of Stylish apparently went to greedy on trying to monetize their purchase and decided to collect your browsing history. So now there is a rando company out there I’ve never heard of because apparently they didn’t got the memo on our new and shiny GDPR policy, who knows that I spend too much time on the dark side of YouTube looking for videos about industrial shredders destroying stuff. And now Google and Mozilla decided to punish their new owners by pulling off their add-on from extension stores. There goes your purchase, suckers.

Anyway, I switched to Stylus. But I think that I uninstalled Stylish too fast because I lost my custom styles, so I haad to recreate them again. Shame on me. So until Stylus is sold again to another ad company from hell, and until another web extension in my browser betrays my trust once again, here is a backup of my custom styles:

* {
    -moz-osx-font-smoothing: initial !important;
    -webkit-font-smoothing: initial !important;
}

Before:

See how skinny the text is?

After:

Bold text.