Opera has the best typography

lucire

lucire

Not a complaint, but a bit of praise.

I’ve been using Opera on and off for over a decade and I still remember, going back to the start of the last decade, how v. 11 produced a lot of errors in typography in Windows. Now, however, it’s by far and away the best Chromium-based browser in terms of how it renders type.

Opera GX became my main browser in January after two-and-a-half years on Vivaldi. For some reason that no one can fathom, the type on that became really ugly with v. 2.9. Opera GX (and regular Opera) still display as Vivaldi once did.

I use MacType, which I added when Windows upgraded me to 10. It helps (in my opinion) with how type displays and gives it a bit more fidelity with that the designer of those typefaces intended.

It seems most Chromium-based browsers became incompatible with MacType at some point, and I don’t mean 2016 when Directwrite could no longer be toggled within Chromium. Yet I’ve had some beautiful displays since 2017 when I switched to Vivaldi, something that the experts say shouldn’t happen. Well, it does, and I’ve plenty of screenshots on my blog. Whether MacType is the reason or not, I can’t say with 100 per cent certainty. Maybe Opera is working with Windows’ native ClearType better. Whatever the case, everything looks better in Opera, with Firefox coming a close second.

The point at which Vivaldi changed was 2.9, when it went from Chromium 77 to 78. Yet downloading Chromium 77 showed that its display was poor, too. As is Edge, as is Vivaldi, as is Brave, as is Cent Browser (on default).

As far as I can tell, Opera is based around Chromium 79 and suffers from none of these issues.

Whatever you’re doing to give me great type, please don’t change it.