Webfont Smoothing and Antialiasing in Firefox and Opera

I have custom-made web fonts used on my site. To style my rendering output, I used the following code:

//-webkit-text-stroke-width: .05px;
//-webkit-text-stroke-color: white;
-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased;

This works fine on Safari and Chrome (edges are sharper and lines are thinner). Is there any way of implementing the same style on Firefox and Opera?


Solution 1:

As Opera is powered by Blink since Version 15.0 -webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased does also work on Opera.

Firefox has finally added a property to enable grayscaled antialiasing. After a long discussion it will be available in Version 25 with another syntax, which points out that this property only works on OS X.

-moz-osx-font-smoothing: grayscale;

This should fix blurry icon fonts or light text on dark backgrounds.

.font-smoothing {
    -webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased;
    -moz-osx-font-smoothing: grayscale;
}

You may read my post about font rendering on OSX which includes a Sass mixin to handle both properties.

Solution 2:

Well, Firefox does not support something like that.

In the reference page from Mozilla specifies font-smooth as CSS property controls the application of anti-aliasing when fonts are rendered, but this property has been removed from this specification and is currently not on the standard track.

This property is only supported in Webkit browsers.

If you want an alternative you can check this:

  • Text-Shadow Anti-Aliasing | Philip Renich, Websites - blog
  • cufón - fonts for the people

Solution 3:

Case: Light text with jaggy web font on dark background Firefox (v35)/Windows
Example: Google Web Font Ruda

Surprising solution -
adding following property to the applied selectors:

selector {
    text-shadow: 0 0 0;
}

Actually, result is the same just with text-shadow: 0 0;, but I like to explicitly set blur-radius.

It's not an universal solution, but might help in some cases. Moreover I haven't experienced (also not thoroughly tested) negative performance impacts of this solution so far.

Solution 4:

After running into the issue, I found out that my WOFF file was not done properly, I sent a new TTF to FontSquirrel which gave me a proper WOFF that was smooth in Firefox without adding any extra CSS to it.