Comment 2 for bug 189720

Created attachment 287619
Comparison: GTK+ vs Firefox 2 vs Minefield

Comparison between GTK+ (made with a label on Glade), Firefox 2 and a recent Minefield build. See how Firefox 2 renders pretty much the same as GTK, if not absolutely equal (I haven't made an exact-pixel comparison).

I chose small-size and italic fonts because they illustrate better the effect. Courier New is particularly affected, since it is so thin that most of its vertical strokes become less than one pixel wide and show heavy color distortion.

Rendering libraries: Ubuntu 7.10, libxft2 2.1.12, libfreetype6 2.3.5, fontconfig 2.4.2.
Settings: slight hinting using native hinters, grayscale anti-aliasing on gnome-appearance-properties and forced subpixel anti-aliasing via fontconfig (this is the recommended hack to make OpenOffice.org render fonts decently, but even when I had Ubuntu's default settings I had similar problems).