Is it possible to enable directwrite in chrome?

Question

I prefer google chrome in almost every way above IE10, but one thing I hate is that fonts just look much better in IE10. This especially visible with small math fonts. They look like pdf quality in IE10.

After searching a little bit, I found out that this is because IE10 use DirectWrite in windows 7/8 for font rendering. I was searching if chrome will support this in the future and I found this information:

Apr 24, 2013:

An update for everyone that's watching this one:

Our Windows font rendering is actively being worked on. Basic support for DirectWrite is now in Skia (to update from comment #13). At the same time, GDI was very deeply embedded in the Windows WebKit port and is still being rooted out. We hope to have something within a milestone or two that developers can start playing with. How fast it goes to stable is, as always, all about how fast we can root out and burn down any regressions.

We'll update the thread here when it's available behind a runtime flag for y'all to try out.

Oct 8, 2013

The following revision refers to this bug: http://src.chromium.org/viewvc/blink?view=rev&rev=159071 Changed paths: M http://src.chromium.org/viewvc/blink/trunk/Source/core/platform/graphics/skia/FontCacheSkiaWin.cpp?r1=159071&r2=159070&pathrev=159071 M http://src.chromium.org/viewvc/blink/trunk/Source/core/page/RuntimeEnabledFeatures.in?r1=159071&r2=159070&pathrev=159071
Add runtime flag for using DirectWrite on windows
Add runtime enabled feature for using the DirectWrite skia backend on
windows.
BUG=25541 [email protected], [email protected]
Review URL: https://codereview.chromium.org/26335002

I don't even know what a runtime flag is, but this sounds to me that it may be possible to somehow enable directwrite in chrome. Is this true ? Or should I wait a little longer before I can use directwrite font rendering in chrome ?

Answer 1

Sadly not yet (as of 2013-10-31, no Chromium channels supports this feature out-of-the-box).

If you look at the latest RuntimeEnabledFeatures.in, DirectWrite doesn't have any status assigned to it. According to Blink document, users cannot enable a feature via about:flags unless status=experimental is assigned.

But hopefully soon, so windows users may have a better time with web fonts :)

Update 2013-11-16: with latest issue 25541 comment, it seems we are very close to be able to enable DirectWrite in Canary.

Update 2014-01-04: Canary build now has a command line switch that can enable DirectWrite font rendering, but disabling sandbox mode are required (not safe for everyday browsing). There are also a few font rendering problem associate with it. Hopefully they can get them fixed and add this feature to about:flags soon.

Update 2014-05-09: latest Canary build (m36) now has proper support for DirectWrite within sandbox mode (implemented via issue 333029), which means developers can enable DW directly by going to about:flags#enable-direct-write. As for consumers, Google is targeting release on m37.

Update 2014-08-09: Chrome 37 beta enables DirectWrite by default, expect Chrome 37 official release to have it by default as well.

Update 2014-08-31: Chrome 37 stable release has DirectWrite enabled by default! Just note that users can still turn it off at about:flags (some of them use MacType instead).

Answer 2

Chrome 35 (beta) comes with an option to enable DirectWrite for Windows font rendering. Paste the following command in your address bar and click enable:

chrome://flags/#enable-direct-write

Reference: http://www.reddit.com/r/web_design/comments/22q9r9/chrome_35_beta_has_finally_fixed_windows_font/