Appearance of SL Forums very poor in Firefox [Solved]

[Fitzcarraldo]

The appearance of the SL Forums pages looks absolutely awful in Firefox 3.6.3-r10, which I installed from the Sabayon Overlay yesterday. The font of the "sabayon" logo in the top left of the Forums page is very pixellated, the fonts of the shed titles are too chunky and too bold, there are sometimes two vertical, thin black lines running down the page about two centimetres inside the left and right margins of the white area of the page. Is anyone else seeing this?

The other pages of the SL Web site (Home Page, Planet, Wiki etc.) do not suffer from this phenomenon: the fonts look normal on those pages. It is only on the SL Forums pages that I'm experiencing this problem. I should also mention that the SL Forums look fine in Konqueror on the same laptop, and in Firefox under Windows Vista on a different PC.

I've tried various things: a) changing themes via System Settings and by using gtk-chtheme; b) turning anti-aliasing off and on; c) changing the default fonts in Firefox via Edit > Preferences > Fonts & Colours; d) implementing the tips given in the SL Forums thread Subpixel hinting, how do I enable it on Sabayon?. But to no avail.

Aside from downgrading Firefox to see if the appearance of the SL Forums returns to normal, does anyone have any ideas? Has anyone in the SL Development Team made any changes to the SL Forums site in the last day or so, by any chance?

[genfool]

I find this odd, I am on ff 3.6.3 and kde 4.4.2
Everything looks very normal to me, have no issues.

I wonder if it is the I7 you are using? Maybe you could send it to me and I will test it for you, will send you this p-4 in return.

[Fitzcarraldo]

Send you my precious? Not on your life!

I think the horrible rendering must be something to do with Firefox using GTK, and perhaps something odd in the HTML of the SL Forums Web pages too. Yuk. I don't think it is a GPU-related problem, though, because text looks OK on other Web pages (and OK in Konqueror, which doesn't use GTK). What versions of xorg-server, xorg-x11 and mesa are you using?

[genfool]

I have
x11-base 7.4.r1
xorg-server 1.7.6
mesa 7.7
kde 4.4.2
ff 3.6.3

To be fair, this is straight gentoo and not sabayon. I need to update my limbo box and will check that all is the same... This still may be of some use, as it does work perfect here.

[Fitzcarraldo]

Mine are:

xorg-x11-7.4-r1
xorg-server-1.7.6
mesa-7.8.1
kde-meta-4.4.2
mozilla-firefox-3.6.3-r10

[Thev00d00]

screen shot please, and list of any addons, im thinking adblock etc in this instance.

[wolfden]

nope not adblock, I have it on all my FF's and all good here

[Fitzcarraldo]

It's definitely not Adblock Plus, as I checked that. Below is a list of installed extensions, themes and plug-ins (as produced by Extension List Dumper):

Application: Firefox 3.6.3 (20100423154712)
Operating System: Linux (x86_64-gcc3)

EXTENSIONS:
- Adblock Plus 1.2
- Add to Search Bar 2.0
- British English Dictionary 1.19
- ColorfulTabs 4.4
- Extension List Dumper 1.14.8
- Favicon Picker 3 0.5
- Places’ Full Titles 3
- User Agent Switcher 0.7.2
- Verificação ortográfica pt-BR 1.4

THEMES:
- animated firefox 1268221304
- Dark Fox
- Default 3.6.3
- Firefox B
- firefox_blue
- Fire Fox Grau Blau
- Firefox Pavoninus

PLUGINS:
- DivX Browser Plug-In
- Java(TM) Plug-in 1.6.0_20
- mplayerplug-in is now gecko-mediaplayer 0.9.9.2
- QuickTime Plug-in 7.6.4
- RealPlayer 9
- Shockwave Flash
- VLC Multimedia Plug-in
- Windows Media Player Plug-in

Here are some screenshots from, in order, Firefox in Windows 7 (same laptop), Firefox in Vista (different PC), Firefox in Sabayon Linux (same laptop) and Konqueror in Sabayon Linux (same laptop):









I don't know whether you guys can see a difference, but it's very noticeable at my end: Firefox in SL is really ugly. Can you see that even the smiley looks terrible in Firefox under SL? It must be a GTK-related thing, because SL Forums in Konqueror looks fine. By the way, the vertical lines I complained about in my first post disappeared -- I don't know whether that was after a reboot or after tinkering with themes, fonts etc. a few days ago. But the fonts are still awful.

[wolfden]

odd, don't get that in SL Gnome or KDE with both fully updated

[Fitzcarraldo]

And, as I wrote previously, it only happens on the SL Forums pages, not on the other SL Web site pages. So I wonder if it is Firefox + GTK + phpBB.