I installed ttf-mscorefonts-installer and set the fonts to Times New Roman, Arial, Courier new for serif, sans serif and monospace respectively. Just like I have it set in Windows.

The screenshots are using Pale Moon, but it looks same for Firefox.

The same thing happens for a few other websites.

Any idea on how to change this?

pretty sure there was a weird thing a few months back where this kept happening at random to lots of users.
maybe its back?

It happens to some other webpages. gamefaqs.com has the same issue for the font used in its polls.

well, ive no other input to give im afraid, but if i can find any of the threads on the issue on here, maybe it will shed some light?!

I much prefer the linux.png to the Windows one. That said what font is that in the Windows screenshot? You don't actually have helvetica on Windows do you?

Inspect element on the Wishlist entry and click the Font tab might be helpful. Also, IIRC, you can change what font Wordpad displays with in Win 7 to try and manually match it.

Look fine to me. Clear and readable, which is what i want in screen text. And i agree with Gydion, off the two screens you posted the Linux one looks nicer (to me).

I'm using Linux Mint, so maybe it is a distro thing? You could always look at changing the fonts your distro uses?

Both are Arial

I guess it's a matter of preference which one looks better, but why does the same font looks smaller on Linux?

Here is another example. Arial everywhere. But the font used in the poll top right looks smaller in Linux than Windows.

So it's caused by the differences in subpixel rendering (Cleartype in Windows vs what Linux Mint uses).

https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/78441/firefox-in-linux-doesnt-interpret-12px-arial-correctly-but-1em-or-0-9-does

It is especially noticeable on size 12px. As in the screenshots in the link. The workaround is to change 12px to 13px. But I'll look around if there is a better solution.
Also found this:
https://pandasauce.org/post/linux-fonts/

You can change this behavior in Mint (at least for pages which don't enforce use of their own fonts) - just go to Control Center -> Appearance -> Fonts and pick whichever rendering method looks best to you (click on Details if you're a true nitpicker).

Thanks. I tried those already. Unfortunately from what I read font rendering on Linux is still a mess.

Some of it is a matter of getting used to (you're using different fonts than Windows so they might look "ugly" because they're not what you're used to). But some are just wrong. Take a look at the attachment for example (look at fh and fj).

It's using ligatures from a different font.

Have you tried the first answer (by Calimo) from https://askubuntu.com/questions/125297/how-can-i-fix-ttf-fonts-ligatures-tt-ti-fi-ff-etc-in-firefox ?

Edit: It's probably not a good idea to do that permanently, but it is a good test.

I changed my font from Calibri to something else. That fixed the ligatures at least.

Alright, after a couple of hours of playing around I think I got it done.
It's the Arial font in small size that caused problems. Used Stylem to change it to Liberation in the few places that caused most problems in the websites I often visit. This looks good