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Roboto Google Font not sharp

Recently, YouTube changed their official font to Roboto, but I'm wondering why (and how to fix it if possible).

On Firefox, Roboto doesn't render out all that great. The edges aren't sharp and some of the text is hard to read (notice the odd bumps on some of the letters):

http://i.imgur.com/B5c9cUa.png

On Chrome, it renders better, but it's still not perfect:

http://i.imgur.com/E3p2ZKz.png

On Internet Explorer, it looks just as bad it does on Firefox:

http://i.imgur.com/PWEZJer.png

My first question is, is there a way to make the font sharper? Would not using the font from Google Fonts help?

My second question is, why would Google choose to change the font of YouTube to a font that hasn't been rendered all that great on most browsers except their own?

Also, I'd like to know if anyone else using Firefox has this issue as well:

http://www.google.com/fonts#QuickUsePlace:quickUse/Family:Roboto

Thanks.

Solution

  • This seems to looks fine on FF37 in Windows 7: https://i.sstatic.net/Ltzwh.png -- try running Firefox in safe mode, so that you're running FF in "stock" mode and see if it still looks bad.

    It's possible that you, at some point in the past modified some of the about:config flags to improve 2d rendering in some way (which could have been as far back as FF9 or something). If so, the rolling update will have preserved that value ever since, and that may now be coming back as rendering artifacts.