Better text-based chromium-based chromium in Windows | Chrome for developers

Published: February 12, 2025

The job of a web rendering engine is much, and most of this work, such as styling, media, or layout, are driven by standards. These standards ensure that independent machines can move, allowing the web to improve. But some finer details, such as how the text translated the level of the pixel, often left to interpret the standards of the operating systems.

In 2020, Microsoft Edge has a rare opportunity – a complete replacement of underlying rendering engine.
Edge is transferred to chromiumaway from a platform window where it is used directly Windows APIs, and has become a real cross-platform web rendererer. Before the chromium switch, the edge depends entirely on a Windows API called
Writing
for rendering the text. However, Chromium relies SkiA powerful and easy cross-platform graphics engine, abstract to most of the code specified by the operating system from API.

During the edge of the chromium edge, the internal edge has the opportunity to gather feedback from its users about the chromium rendering engine. A piece of feedback is important – many edge users shared that the text shows “washed” and that it doesn’t agree with other parts of Windows.

The team took this feedback seriously and did some investigation. While Skia uses directly directly into windows for some functions like Font Lookup, the last text rasterization is actually reserved in the skia. And a factor that causes “washed” feedback from users is internal variation and gamma settings for rending the text.

Two main differences in the text difference and gamma values ​​do not know between stromium-based machine and at first machine. First, skia does not select a text difference and gamma values ​​from
Windows Cleartype Tuner. Second, it uses different default values ​​for text differences and gamma than used in StirdWrite-based text stack.

The team’s road is added support for respect to chromium ClearType ClearType directly, last year. This browser provides chromium-based browser using the ability to control text controlling differences and gamma settings in windows. While this is an important step in the correct direction, most users are likely to not adjust their system wide text contrastt and gamma settings. So the next phase of this trip is seriously consider adjusting the default text and gamma comparability for text and browser UI text.

Changing what the web text looks like a big activity. Web is always heavy text, and a high-quality text of the text is required. Obviously the amount of text that is different necessary to increase, but data is required to determine what it is adjusting.

The content is beginning to experiment with different text comparison values ​​in 2021 applications on Native Windows Windows.

On the edge of the room, we believe that our research and experiments can be beneficial to the General Chromium community in Windows, which we have confirmed their experiments. We maintain new difference to the new value by default for Windows windows, starting with Chrome 132.

Today, all users of chromium-based browsers can benefit from past years of research, experimentation, and enforcement.

Special thanks to Ian Perst, Daniel Libby, and Alison Microsoft, as well as Dominik Röttsches, David Ben Wagner on Google in this project!