Better text contrast for all Chromium-based browsers on Windows

In today's digital age, browser users spend significant time reading content online. The contrast ratio between the text and its background is therefore very important to ensure comfort and to reduce eye strain. That's why, based on your feedback, we had already enhanced text rendering in Microsoft Edge back in 2021. Today, we're taking things one step further and we're happy to announce that our enhanced text rendering is now available for users across all Chromium-based browsers on Windows. For Google Chrome specifically, enhanced text contrast is available on Windows starting with Chrome version 132.

What's new

We have brought our contrast enhancement and gamma correction improvements to the Chromium open-source project. This way, the quality and clarity of the text that's displayed in all browsers that are based on Chromium now match that of other native Windows applications. To give you a better understanding of the improvement, here are a few different text contrast comparisons. We experimented with text rendering at various contrast values, comparing them to the current 0.5 contrast value. The screenshot below demonstrates that increasing the contrast value to 1.0 significantly enhances text visibility, particularly in scenarios involving lighter-weight text and CJK languages, which we heard a lot of feedback about.

Customize contrast and gamma values

On Windows, you are always in control of how text is rendered. Use the ClearType Text Tuner to test and configure different contrast and gamma values. Open the Start menu and search for Adjust ClearType text. With the text contrast enhancement we made to Chromium, the Windows ClearType Text Tuner now also applies to the browser.

Technical background

To give some context as to why this change was made, we need to look at how Microsoft Edge used to render text before we adopted the Chromium project. In these older versions, Microsoft Edge used DirectWrite to render text, which ensured consistent system-wide settings across Windows applications. In contrast, Chromium uses DirectWrite only for some parts of the text-rendering pipeline, using Skia, its own text shaping and rendering system, for the rest. This led to lighter text rendering in Chromium, especially noticeable in CJK characters.

Let us know your feedback

As always, your comments and suggestions are invaluable as we continue to enhance text rendering on the web. If you notice an issue with text contrast on Windows, in a Chromium browser, please open the issue on the Chromium bug tracker. Additionally, you can send us feedback via the Microsoft Edge feedback window by going to Settings and more (…) > Help and feedback > Send feedback.