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How to override font smoothing used in Google Sheets grid to make fonts sharp (as everywhere else on a page) in Firefox?

As you can see from the screenshot below, most of the elements use sharp font (standard Windows smoothing, not Clear Type). Even text in a cell edit textbox is OK (see 'World' word). But column names (A, B, C, D, E), row names (1, 2, 3) and cells content (see 'Hello' word).

I tried to analyze the grid using Developer Tools (F12) but it looks as a single element and whichever style I apply to it , it has little to no effect.

A custom style (font-family: sans-serif !important;) has been applied to the page using stylus extension.

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Giacomo1968
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o.v
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1 Answers1

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Looks like it's a bug of Firefox's WebGL implementation

I just updated to FF 115.15.0esr and noticed the issue is still there. Yet, I could successfully circumvent it.

(source : https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/t/really-blurry-fonts-in-google-sheets-in-ff-after-scroll/89281 )

Turning off Hardware acceleration in FF settings and restarting Firefox the issue is no longer happening on Google Sheets :exploding_head: :firecracker: so possible GPU driver related?

Of course, disabling hardware acceleration will probably impact some sites performances significantly, but I think in that case, easy solutions will be available.

Two come to my mind (didn't try yet, I may update this later) :

  • Using a specific session/browser for sheets (you can run several FF instances in parallel with no issues)
    My shortcuts launches FF with those parameters "[...]\firefox.exe" -no-remote -P SessionId

  • Find an add-on to disable webGL only on Sheets domain.

I checked the linked bug the thread talks about (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1845309 ) and am not sure I understood well where I was.
From what I did read, I'd think it's actually fixed in 115.15, but disabling hardware acceleration is still necessary (and working fix) for me.
So maybe I should apply the patch, but... can one do that on a compiled version ? I think not.

Balmipour
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