Subtle change in font?

[hbelkins]

Rebooted this morning (MacBook Pro with Chrome as my browser) and I'm seeing a subtle change in the forum font. I can't put my finger on exactly what's changed, but it looks different today than it did last night.

Did something get tweaked overnight, or did my reboot cause Chrome to do funny things?

[Zeffy]

I'm not noticing anything different on my Firefox browser running Windows 8.1.

[on_wisconsin]

No change here. (Windows 7, Firefox 32)

[1995hoo]

I haven't noticed any difference either on my PC (Windows 7, Waterfox 31.0) or on my iPad (iOS 7 and Safari).

[vdeane]

The last Chrome update for Windows updated the font rendering engine.  That might be it.

[hbelkins]

I've noticed some changes on other pages too. I must have installed an update when I quit Chrome and restarted my Mac.

[theline]

I've noticed the change in fonts in Chrome too, on those things that I do in Chrome, like Gmail. I generally read AA Roads in IE. No font change there.

[Alps]

I noticed it and I thought I screwed something up with my browser. OK, it's not me.

[vdeane]

I've noticed the new font renderer seems to screw up the Roadgeek 2005 font I use for my exit lists; I may have to upgrade my site to 2014.

[formulanone]

The forum fonts look a little more rounded in Chrome, and appear a tiny bit smaller.

[FLRoads]

I noticed the subtle font difference this morning when I was looking at some of the site pages, but didn't really think too much into it. It's very subtle, but its there.

After seeing this thread I did a search to see what Google did to Chrome. While I didn't find anything out about why they tweeked the font style, I did find a way to revert the font back:

Open a new tab and in the url window, type (or copy and paste) this link:

chrome://flags

Press the ENTER key.

Find on the page the following "experiment":

Disable DirectWrite Windows
Disables the use of experimental DirectWrite font rendering system. #disable-direct-write
Enable

Click the Enable link. This will set the font rendering system as disabled.

Click on the Relaunch Now button at the bottom of the page to activate the change.

Your Chrome broswer tab(s) should all refresh and the font should revert back. I checked this out toggling back and forth on a couple of AARoads guides and it worked for me.

Hope this helps anyone not liking the change in fonts!

[lordsutch]

They tweaked the font style because DirectWrite is the correct API for modern displays with high pixel densities, and because that way Chrome's font rendering will match that of other modern Windows apps. See http://blog.chromium.org/2014/07/chrome-37-beta-directwrite-on-windows.html

[Alex]

Had to revert my fonts back, because most fonts on other websites defaulted to bold. This happened to me before with a Windows update, and I hated it. Glad the fix this time was easier; the fix prior was a system restore...