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0 pointsdangrossman13y ago0 comments

Chrome's text rendering has been pretty broken on Windows since September 2012-ish. There are lots of long bug reports on Chromium's tracker with little effort to fix them. Custom fonts render too thin to the point of discontinuities in the glyphs. The blitting algorithm was messed up so non-black text is often rendered a significantly different color than is specified in the stylesheet. High DPI support is nonexistant (while it was supported for Mac and Linux quickly), so rasterized text is simply scaled up by fractional multipliers, which makes it terribly blurry in both the UI and webpages.

I can only imagine that so many on the Chrome team are running Macs and Ubuntu that they don't see how terrible their software is becoming on Windows in fundamental ways.

0 pointsdangrossman13y ago0 comments

Chrome: http://i.imgur.com/VBgcURG.png

IE10: http://i.imgur.com/ZBrhDoS.png

Firefox: http://i.imgur.com/ROwDLkb.png

I can only imagine that so many on the Chrome team are running Macs and Ubuntu that they don't see how terrible their software is becoming on Windows in fundamental ways.

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4 comments · 1 top-level

anonymous13y ago· 3 in thread

Damn those are ugly. If I had to choose though, I'd pick Chrome. The variable width is nothing compared to the rainbow text of the latter two.

ferongr13y ago

There's almost no fringing in Firefox's text (and Mozilla devs went through a lot of pain trying to find good defaults for DirectWrite text in the post Fx4 days) but there's quite a bit in IE's text (see the "k" and "a" letters).

Chrome's text looks completely atrocious though. Hinting is completely random and different letters have different sizes. To my experience, this has been this way since the release of Chrome. With the proliferation of Webfonts some time later Mozilla's and Microsoft's choice to use DirectWrite paid off while Chrome has made no improvement.

gcr13y ago

Working on a CRT monitor? You can easily adjust subpixel smoothing settings on any OS to get rid of the rainbow. (Windows calls this "Cleartype"; it's right in the control panel)

oakwhiz13y ago

The text is "rainbow" on purpose because subpixel rendering is enabled (it enhances text for specific LCD monitor types)

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