Firefox 3.5 Font Fix On Jaunty

Firefox 3.5 has been released a couple of days ago and I started using it at work on my Windows XP machine. I must say I'm quite happy with certain improvements and speed.

This new version will be the default one in the upcoming Ubuntu release but can also be installed on Jaunty. It will be installed as a separate application so it won't mess up any regular Firefox configurations.

$ sudo apt-get install firefox-3.5

The main problem I had was that Firefox 3.5 uses a different implementation when rendering fonts and all the webpages looked boldier, bulkier and crispier and gave me a headache after 5 minutes. Luckely this can be solved easily as I found on the Ubuntu forums.

$ sudo rm /etc/fonts/conf.d/10-hinting-slight.conf
$ sudo rm /etc/fonts/conf.d/10-no-sub-pixel.conf
$ sudo ln -s /etc/fonts/conf.available/10-hinting-medium.conf /etc/fonts/conf.d/.
$ sudo ln -s /etc/fonts/conf.available/10-sub-pixel-rgb.conf /etc/fonts/conf.d/.
$ sudo dpkg-reconfigure fontconfig

That looks so much better now...

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