Win7 vs. SnowLeo (browser-comparison) - apparent differences in font-sizes

[Dietmar]

I stumbled across this experience:

I´m mainly using SnowLeopard, mostly Safari and Chrome over the last weeks, so I noticed no difference in the fontsize of xenforo so far.

When I was on Windows 7 yesterday and opened xenforo on Chrome for the first time, I noticed the significantly smaller size of the message-font.

So I performed a comparison on both operating systems with the following results:

Windows7
Firefox 3.6, Chrome 6 and Safari (most recent version) and Opera 10 are having the same look exactly (smaller fonts).

SnowLeopard 10.6.4
Chrome 6, Safari 5 and Opera 10 are having the same look - with larger fonts than their windows-versions. Only Firefox 3.6 is giving the same impression like it´s windows-counterpart with a smaller font-size.

I like the smaller font-size more, but I have no clue how to force Chrome, Safari and Opera on Snow Leopard to give me this look.

Maybe a noob-question, but I couldn´t resist.

 

[Paul B]

You could use browser detection to adjust font size but it might be a lot of work due to the number of different fonts in use throughout the code.

I currently use browser detection on my site to set specific CSS for IE6 and IE7 due to them, well, just not working properly.

 

[Dietmar]

Thank you for your answer!
Apologies for the misunderstandable first post - I didn´t set up a xenForo-site of my own so far, I just happened to watch those font-rendering-differences within this site.

I waited a bit - searching around the web - and still have no sufficient idea with this outcome.
I compared my own vbulletin-forum with the default-fonts and the default-style with the official ipb-board (with standard-fonts and standard-style AFAIK) and with this site.

The vbulletin-message-fonts are looking identically on all webkit-browsers (Safari/Chrome) + Opera on both platforms (Snow Leopard and Windows7). The ipb-board-message-fonts ditto. Firefox seems to render the vb-fonts a tad bigger under MacOSX.

The message-fonts of this site are looking identically on all webkit-browsers + Opera on Windows.
The same fonts are rendering identically bigger on all webkit-browsers (Safari/Chrome) + Opera under MacOSX. Interestingly Firefox under MacOSX is rendering the xenForo-message-fonts here with the same size as under Windows (as far as I perceived it).

So the difference in rendering-outcomes must have something to do with the font-choice here in interaction with rendering-techniques on both platforms/browsers. I remember a font-change a few weeks ago here, since then the message-fonts are significantly bigger in Snow Leopard.

I´d like to give my users the same "layout"-experience on both os-platforms. Perhaps I´ll be able to choose a font within my upcoming xenForo-installation, which will meet this need. But I´m still wondering about the mentioned differences.