I like to pretend I’m a responsible computer owner.  I update everything the moment it’s available, even if I should know better.  If you’re the same, you’re probably seeing the same font nastiness I am on Firefox 18.  And it’s not just me.

A few hours ago, Blogger sites hurt my eyes, but it looks like Google has made a few tweaks to fix issues in Firefox.  Still, the bug fixed in Firefox 17.01 seems to have re-asserted itself in Firefox 18.

Fortunately, it is fixable, at least on Windows 8.  Full details are here in this ghacks article. I’ve done my own experimentation; the solution mostly works, though a few sites still seem to render strangely (including the “text” tab of WordPress’ own blogging editor).  Toggling gfx.font_rendering.cleartype.always_use_for_content to “true” just makes the problem worse on most sites, even if sites like Reddit look a little better, so my advice is, “Don’t touch!”

Update:

After downgrading to Firefox 17.0.1 for a couple of days, I upgraded to Firefox 18.0.1.  By turning on hardware acceleration (Options > Advanced > General > check “Use hardware acceleration when available“), most sites looked a lot better, even if they’re still not perfect.