Same font except its weight seems different on different browsers

Question

The text is correctly displayed in Chrome. I want it to display this way in all browsers. How can I do this?

I was able to fix this in Safari with -webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased;

Chrome:

Firefox:

And a JSFiddle: http://jsfiddle.net/jnxQ8/1/

Answer 1

Be sure the font is the same for all browsers. If it is the same font, then the problem has no solution using cross-browser CSS.

Because every browser has its own font rendering engine, they are all different. They can also differ in later versions, or across different OS's.

UPDATE: For those who do not understand the browser and OS font rendering differences, read this and this.

However, the difference is not even noticeable by most people, and users accept that. Forget pixel-perfect cross-browser design, unless you are:

1. Trying to turn-off the subpixel rendering by CSS (not all browsers allow that and the text may be ugly...)
2. Using images (resources are demanding and hard to maintain)
3. Replacing Flash (need some programming and doesn't work on iOS)

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UPDATE: I checked the example page. Tuning the kerning by text-rendering should help:

text-rendering: optimizeLegibility; 

More references here:

1. Part of the font-rendering is controlled by font-smoothing (as mentioned) and another part is text-rendering. Tuning these properties may help as their default values are not the same across browsers.
2. For Chrome, if this is still not displaying OK for you, try this text-shadow hack. It should improve your Chrome font rendering, especially in Windows. However, text-shadow will go mad under Windows XP. Be careful.