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Recently, YouTube changed their official font to Roboto, but I'm wondering why (and how to fix it if possible).

On Firefox, Roboto doesn't render out all that great. The edges aren't sharp and some of the text is hard to read (notice the odd bumps on some of the letters):

http://i.imgur.com/B5c9cUa.png

On Chrome, it renders better, but it's still not perfect:

http://i.imgur.com/E3p2ZKz.png

On Internet Explorer, it looks just as bad it does on Firefox:

http://i.imgur.com/PWEZJer.png

My first question is, is there a way to make the font sharper? Would not using the font from Google Fonts help?

My second question is, why would Google choose to change the font of YouTube to a font that hasn't been rendered all that great on most browsers except their own?

Also, I'd like to know if anyone else using Firefox has this issue as well:

http://www.google.com/fonts#QuickUsePlace:quickUse/Family:Roboto

Thanks.

  • FWIW the font looks fine for me in Firefox 37.0.1 and IE10, Windows 8 – sricks Apr 09 '15 at 16:21
  • Odd, I'm using Firefox 37.0.1 as well. Are you sure you don't notice the very slight bumps on some of the letters like the `a` in `wizards`? –  Apr 09 '15 at 16:32
  • Yes, I see it clearly in your screenshots (awful clearly) but in Firefox it looks completely fine – sricks Apr 09 '15 at 18:38

1 Answers1

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This seems to looks fine on FF37 in Windows 7: https://i.stack.imgur.com/Ltzwh.png -- try running Firefox in safe mode, so that you're running FF in "stock" mode and see if it still looks bad.

It's possible that you, at some point in the past modified some of the about:config flags to improve 2d rendering in some way (which could have been as far back as FF9 or something). If so, the rolling update will have preserved that value ever since, and that may now be coming back as rendering artifacts.

Mike 'Pomax' Kamermans
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    I found the issue. It was because of the Roboto font I had installed on my computer. Is there way to, via CSS or HTML, override the user's font so that it always uses the Google font? –  Apr 09 '15 at 18:47
  • You could make your own stylesheet for the @font-face rules, with a name that you know won't conflict with the version you have installed on your OS. – Mike 'Pomax' Kamermans Apr 09 '15 at 20:15