Firefox 3 vs. Safari 3 typography showdown

Posted by John Brownlee, June 19, 2008 8:41 AM | permalink

Ralf Herrmann's typography blog has a great post up comparing the type handling of Safari 3, which doesn't support kerning or OpenType layout features, with Firefox 3, which does in theory. Unfortunately, it's still got a way to go: for example, ligatures are applied universally that should only appear under certain contextual conditions. Hopefully this will continue to be tweaked for the point releases.

Kerning and OpenType features in Firefox 3 [Ralf Herrmann via TUAW]

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Discussion

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#1 posted by strider_mt2k

, June 19, 2008 8:53 AM

That's really something alright.

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#2 posted by Anonymous , June 19, 2008 9:51 AM

Reading the comments you'll find it all works perfectly, contextual ligatures included, in FF3 on XP. It's FF3 on OSX that's the problem. And someone apparently in the know appears to point the finger at OSX's type engine.

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#3 posted by joefru , June 19, 2008 11:52 AM

That's all well and good, but I don't have any of those fonts, so all I would see is Times New Roman anyway.

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#4 posted by dnl2ba , June 20, 2008 12:09 AM

@JOEFRU: Safari 3.1 supports @font-face, so in Safari, you'd see the right font if the developer specified it.

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#5 posted by Matt J , June 20, 2008 3:31 PM

@DNL2BA: Except that the licenses on most typefaces do not allow for distribution, preventing embedding.