Improved Text Contrast for Chromium-Based Browsers on Windows: Better Readability and Comfort

In today’s digital world, millions of browser users spend a significant amount of time reading content online. One key factor that can make or break the reading experience is the contrast ratio between text and its background. Poor text contrast can lead to eye strain and make reading difficult, while high contrast enhances visibility and overall user comfort.

At Microsoft, we’ve long been committed to improving readability in our browsers. Based on user feedback, we first introduced enhanced text rendering in Microsoft Edge back in 2021. Today, we’re excited to announce that we’ve expanded this improvement across all Chromium-based browsers on Windows, including Google Chrome. For Chrome users, enhanced text contrast is now available starting with version 132.

What’s New? Enhanced Text Contrast and Clarity

We’ve made significant improvements to text contrast and gamma correction by contributing these changes to the Chromium open-source project. As a result, all Chromium-based browsers on Windows will now display text with improved clarity and quality, matching the text rendering of other native Windows applications.

To give you an idea of the improvement, we tested different contrast values, comparing them to the current baseline of 0.5. The results were clear: increasing the contrast to 1.0 significantly improves text visibility, especially in scenarios involving lighter text or CJK (Chinese, Japanese, and Korean) characters, which we received a lot of feedback about.

Here’s an example of what we mean:

• Text rendered with contrast values of 0.0, 0.25, 0.5, 0.75, and 1.0.
• At a contrast of 1.0, text becomes much more visible, enhancing readability across the board.

Customize Your Contrast Settings

With this new enhancement, you now have more control over how text is rendered in Chromium-based browsers on Windows. If you’d like to adjust the contrast or gamma settings to your preference, you can easily do so using the ClearType Text Tuner.

Here’s how:

• Open the Start menu.
• Search for Adjust ClearType text.
• Follow the instructions to customize the contrast and gamma values.

Thanks to the recent updates, the ClearType Text Tuner now applies to text rendered in Chromium browsers, allowing you to fine-tune your experience.

Why This Change Was Made: A Technical Background

To understand why this change is so important, let’s dive into a bit of technical history.

Before adopting the Chromium project, Microsoft Edge used DirectWrite for text rendering, ensuring consistent rendering across all Windows applications. However, Chromium relies on Skia, its own text shaping and rendering system, for most of its text rendering. While DirectWrite was used for some parts of Chromium’s text rendering pipeline, this often resulted in lighter, less readable text, especially for CJK languages.

By contributing these enhancements to the Chromium project, we’ve aligned text rendering across all Chromium-based browsers with the native Windows experience, ensuring better readability for all users.