font-variant: small-caps; shows different font sizes using Chrome or Firefox

Question

font-variant: small-caps;
font-size: 12px;

Firefox:

• Capital letters: 12px
• Lowercase

Answer 1

I am having a similar issue with a much weirder issue between Safari on iPad vs Safari on Desktops, showing a different scale for small-caps at 16px. For some reason small-caps is a bigger size on iPads, kinda matching that of Firefox.

Adjusting the font size or letter-spacing a half pixel less or so, can mitigate the issue without further additional hack. By essentially finding a tiny middle adjustment which trigger on one browser but not on another, to try and get as close as possible.

What I have observed for Firefox and IE, is that fonts tend to scale with many more intermediate sizes than that of Webkit. For example, in IE and Firefox, 15.6px is a tiny bit bigger or use more tracking to adjust, than that of 15.5px, and so is 15.7px, 15.8px etc. With a difference for nearly every 0.1 pixel. Whereas in Safari the difference is only perceived for every 0.4px or so.

For my small-caps case here which created an overflow issue, I used 15.5px, which is barely different from 16px on Safari (Desktop), yet bring down the small-caps size for IE and Firefox as close as possible to Safari's.