I have been hopping between browsers for a few days now and have found just one thing: Brave is the fastest of the Chromium based bunch. The only thing, however, that I dislike about Chromium are the fonts. When coming from the non-Chromium Edge or Firefox, the first thing to notice are how the fonts are less bold, sometimes even on the verge of readibility (for example, I find the new reddit.com hard to read and fatiguing, while in Edge and Firefox the text is sharp).
I have been researching this topic for a while and found why exactly this is.
By default, DirectWrite recommends setting the font contrast value to 0.5 and this is what Chrome does. Everything seems fine here - following the guidelines is not a bad thing. However, both Edge and Firefox change this value to 1.0. Why? To make the fonts look more like standard ClearType we can see everywhere else in Windows. While googling, I have found a solution – change the SK_GAMMA_CONTRAST value in Chromium’s source code from 0.5 to 1.0 - after that, the fonts look pretty much 1:1 the same like in Firefox.
When I asked several people about it, some prefer the way fonts are rendered in Chromium, some prefer Firefox. So… could it be possible to have an additional option in Brave to enable Firefox/Edge-like font look? Like, hide it in Appearance -> Fonts and name it, I don’t know, “Use fonts with heavier weight” or more like “Use ClearType compatible font rendering”?
Here is what and where to change in the source to achieve the effect: https://codereview.chromium.org/2674883002/diff/1/skia/BUILD.gn
Here is a screenshot showing the difference after modifying SK_GAMMA_CONTRAST to “1.0”. On the right - Chromium default. On the left - contrast 1.0. The left side is also the same as in Firefox.
One could say - “use your modified Chromium build and leave us alone” but, for whatever reason, my builds of Chromium are never stable at all.
Anyhow, I think Brave will stay my main browser both on PC and Android no matter the fonts, so… keep up the good work and thank you