Description of problem: Font spacing is poor in Firefox by default. It seems to be relted to Pango support. Using "export MOZ_DISABLE_PANGO=1" corrects the spacing issue. I will attach screenshots of both bad and good spacing. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): How reproducible: Everytime Steps to Reproduce: 1. yum install firefox 2. Open firefox 3. Go to http://digg.com/ Actual results: Lots of bad font spacing Expected results: Lots of good font spacing. Additional info: To make sure this wasn't just my fault via some customizing I tried this in a fresh install with updates of F8T1 and got the exact same results.
Created attachment 161136 [details] Example of bad spacing
Created attachment 161137 [details] Example of good spacing
I've found that disabling pango also significantly improves page rendering times in addition to fixing the font spacing/rendering issues. It's still slower than the Official Mozilla builds on F7, but at least it's not annoyingly slow. I found a simply test which illustrates the dramatic performance difference between the two builds of Mozilla: http://www.howtocreate.co.uk/csstest.html Download the page locally to disk, the refresh the page a couple times and see where the load times stabilize in the top right.
At this point, we're going to only be taking security fixes and major stability fixes into this release of Fedora. However, we still want to ensure the bug is fixed in the next version. We'd appreciate if you could test Firefox 3, available at http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/all-beta.html or now shipping as the default in Fedora rawhide and provide feedback as to whether it still exists so we can file a ticket upstream to try to fix it in Firefox 3 before it is released.
I am using the Firefox 3 beta3 rpm from the Remi repository, which is based on older build koji builds. Remi tweaks things so that firefox 2 and 3 can coexist. With Pango enabled the font spacing on Digg looks fine. So this still may be an issue with Firefox 2, but seems fine at the moment with Firefox 3. firefox3-3.0-0.beta3.20080211.fc8.remi.i386
I tried it with Firefox 2.0.0.12 on FC8 with and without Pango. Spacing seemed the same. firefox-2.0.0.12-1.fc8.i386
OK, so this will be apparently fixed in FF3 (if it has not been fixed already). Closing as NEXTRELEASE.