Grey text, a short cut to eye strain

October 13, 2007 12:10 PM

Gmail annoyance: With every autosave, gmail changes the black text in the writing field to a blurry grey. Ouch, my eyes! How to disable?

This, er, feature seems to have erupted with the purchase of my new 24" iMac. It didn't seem to be active when I typed out emails on Firefox on my previous machine, an old, slow Mac Mini. This could be sheer coincidence, of course. In any event, I began to notice it two months ago.

I'd prefer to text to remain in a constant black state during autosave -- and, of course, retain the very useful autosave feature. And continue to use Firefox as my browser of choice.

If I have to disable dynamic html to get rid of the grey text, well, I'll bite the bullet and do it. But only as a last resort.

Disabling hints?

posted by Gordion Knott to computers & internet (3 comments total)

Can you post a screenshot?
posted by notpeter at 1:15 PM on October 13, 2007

I have never noticed this with my Gmail auto-save on multiple computers. Which makes me think it's your new monitor?
posted by rhapsodie at 2:27 PM on October 13, 2007

Does it look like part of the text just went to a really nasty, uneven boldface? That's a problem I see pretty frequently with Firefox on my Mac. I believe it has something to do with OS X's subpixel rendering setup and the Gecko engine? Anyway, it goes away, for me, by forcing a redraw — either cmd+a'ing or F11,F11'ing.
posted by electric_counterpoint at 7:24 PM on October 13, 2007