Change #1064499 had a related patch set uploaded (by Bartosz Dziewoński; author: Bartosz Dziewoński):

[mediawiki/skins/Vector@master] Fix workaround for `position: sticky` disabling subpixel rendering

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/1064499

It impacts all font sizes, although the smaller the font, the more noticeable the poor text rendering is.

Change #1064499 merged by jenkins-bot:

[mediawiki/skins/Vector@master] Fix workaround for `position: sticky` disabling subpixel rendering

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/1064499

Discussed in task sync. We are fine with moving this to sign off. Assuming we see no visible differences, we can call this a a pass.

In T373066#10094689, @Edtadros wrote:

Verifying on Windows meant Browserstack for me, which isn't the greatest way to see something this subtle.

Indeed, the video encoding artifacts will completely smoosh over the text rendering. It's really hard to test this without an actual Windows device and a physical screen you can look at (or take close-up photos of).

That said, your Windows screenshots look like it's working. The Beta screenshot has the color fringing that I'd expect to see when using subpixel text rendering (although it's extra weird due to the video encoding artifacts). It helps to zoom in a lot:

Beta
Prod

I also did it on macOS natively but still wasn't sure.

macOS doesn't enable subpixel rendering because Apple doesn't make cheap devices with low resolution displays, so they never needed it to make text look nice.

Is there a way that can be verified in DevTools?

I realized I don't know and I went on quite a journey to find out.

It seems the answer is: no, you can't tell anywhere in DevTools whether a bit of text is rendering using subpixel rendering or not; but you can tell how the page is divided into layers to be painted, and this is what determines whether subpixel rendering is used.

You will need to enable the "Rendering" tab, and then on that tab enable "Layer borders". This will draw a bunch of orange borders on the page, indicating which fragments are painted as separate layers:

The internet says that the root layer will always have subpixel rendering enabled, while the other layers may or may not have it depending on unpredictable factors (here's one somewhat outdated article that says so: https://web.dev/articles/antialiasing-101#cutting_to_the_chase). And in these screenshots, you can see that the article content is no longer on a separate layer, and it now has subpixel text rendering.

As a bonus, getting rid of these extra layers is probably good for performance. The "Rendering" tab also lets you enable "Frame Rendering Stats", and when I did that, they said that the new version uses less GPU memory (the numbers varied as I used the page, but they were consistently lower on the beta cluster version).

There is also the "3D View" tab, which tries to show the layers "stacked" in 3D instead of just drawing some borders, and lets you manipulate the view as if you were Tom Cruise in Minority Report. I found this view difficult to read and navigate and it crashed several times as I tried using it, but it is quite neat when it works.

Test Result - PROD

Status: ✅ PASS
Environment: PROD
OS: Windows 11
Browser: Chrome 128
Device: PC
Emulated Device: BrowserStack

Test Artifact(s):

Test Steps

Test Case 1: Verify Subpixel Rendering in Vector 2022 on Windows

1. Open Vector 2022 skin on a Windows device.
2. View the body text at small sizes.
3. ✅ AC1: Confirm that the text uses subpixel rendering for improved clarity.

UPDATE: Pass via T373066#10113773

Small Text	** 100% Zoom	500% Zoom	Layer Boarders	Frame Renders Stats also	3D view

❓ AC1: Confirm that the text uses subpixel rendering for improved clarity.

Confirmed in standup this is OK