“Apple and Microsoft have always disagreed in how to display fonts on computer displays. Today, both companies are using sub-pixel rendering to coax sharper-looking fonts out of typical low resolution screens. Where they differ is in philosophy,” Joel Spolsky writes for Joel on Software.
“Apple generally believes that the goal of the algorithm should be to preserve the design of the typeface as much as possible, even at the cost of a little bit of blurriness.
Microsoft generally believes that the shape of each letter should be hammered into pixel boundaries to prevent blur and improve readability, even at the cost of not being true to the typeface,” Spolsky writes.
“Now that Safari for Windows is available, which goes to great trouble to use Apple’s rendering algorithms, you can actually compare the philosophies side-by-side on the very same monitor and see what I mean. I think you’ll notice the difference,” Spolsky writes.
“Typically, Apple chose the stylish route, putting art above practicality, because Steve Jobs has taste, while Microsoft chose the comfortable route, the measurably pragmatic way of doing things that completely lacks in panache,” Spolsky writes.
Spolsky writes, “When you ask people to choose a style or design that they prefer, unless they are trained, they will generally choose the one that looks most familiar… Which is why Apple engineers probably feel like they’re doing a huge service to the Windows community, bringing their ‘superior’ font rendering technology to the heathens, and it explains why Windows users are generally going to think that Safari’s font rendering is blurry and strange and they don’t know why, they just don’t like it.”
Full article – recommended – here.
MacDailyNews Take: The end result is that Macs look sumptuous and gorgeous, displaying minute attention to detail and Windows looks chintzy and flimsy, displaying a marked lack of care. This is actually perfect, as these very differences permeate throughout all aspects of the platforms: Mac vs. Windows, what you see is what you get.
I really don’t understand this “blurriness” claim. One would think we’d see the same blurriness on a Mac, but fonts are soft and clear. There is no blurriness. I never noticed it in Safari for Windows either.
Can someone post a side-by-side comparison online? The article’s example doesn’t do justice. Let’s see a real-world example.
how pretentious.
Safari’s font-blurring is horrible. CONTENT is more important than style. If readability suffers, how is that a good thing?
Windoze on-screen text looks like what used to be on my Commodore 64. All jagged with sharp edges. yuk.
Whomever writes these MDN Takes is a fscking genius.
And now we have Dell’s at work, I can see more & more people having eye sight problems & this ain’t from old age. It’s the strain people are having to do, looking at PC monitors all day, made from hack companies.
what good will banging away at the subpixels mean when either
a) we’re all lookin at 300dpi screens?
b) we all start using uni-pixel screens (not r/g/b LCDs jammed up next to each other) – because you know, we’ll always be using the same technology with regard to displays. /sarcasm?
answer?
none.
and Apple’s method will look better in the long run.
magic word: long, as in, I’m Justin Long, and i’m a Mac.
alright, i’m a mac zealot ’til death but i CANNOT STAND FONT BLURRING. fonts should be legible, mathematical and precise above all else.
to put it another way, Safari’s colors bleed and look like a used Rear-projection 1980s television.
Note, Windows does have font smoothing, but Safari has chosen not to use it, resulting in text which plain and simply doesn’t look clear.
Those who are actually honest users of Safari, FF and IE in Windows will see it this way.
That means that 90% of those here won’t.
My Mac at home on the other hand looks gorgeous. It’s just Windows Safari that sucks.
coolfactor,
Windows boxes tend to be hooked up to crap quality monitors.
The silly suffferers, always trying to save a nickel shortsightedly and to their detriment, as usual.
that’s because you didn’t turn on ClearType. It’s not enabled by default on a PC. Try it, you might like it.
ok, fasten your seatbelts everybody. here come the Flame Wars Redux
In a related matter, folks are really noticing the blurryness/heavyness/boldness of fonts when using Safari for Windows. This is especially true if you have Cleartype turned on your windows system. One way to make this a step better when using Safari for Windows is to go into Edit/Preferences/Appearance/Font Smoothing and choose the Light option.
And it looks even worse on a high-quality monitor.
that’s because you didn’t turn on ClearType
Thanks, I’ll try it out next time.
That helps a bit, thanks.
alright, i’m a mac zealot ’til death but i CANNOT STAND FONT BLURRING. fonts should be legible, mathematical and precise above all else.
Being a Mac zealot AND graphic designer, I couldn’t disagree more. Font rending should be true to the font design.
That “art above practicality” comment shows a total lack of understanding of the mac aesthetic. It’s not about being “stylish” — it’s about the power of a design aesthetic to communicate. Beautiful, meticulous, and consistent design is as powerful a way to communicate a message as the text and images it includes, and when you combine the two, it’s extremely powerful. It’s why people have such an emotional response to the mac platform, because design communicates on an emotional and psychological level, while text communicates on a purely intellectual level. So when you are rigorous about upholding the design aesthetic, you are really choosing to be rigorous about the totality of your communication, not about making everything “pretty.”
huh? what font “blurring”?
I new there was something up with the clarity of winblows fonts and this clarifies everything. I prefer to see the trueness of the font, instead of chiseling away at it, otherwise, what’s the point of having different fonts.
A link showing the difference:
http://idisk.mac.com/wingsy/Public/ScreenShot001.bmp
On the left is FireFox, the middle is I.E. and the right is Safari. This is on a stock Windows XP Pro install with no modifications. It’s obvious why a lot of Windows users think Safari is blurry. When you get text that looks like it came right off a dot matrix printer, anything with rounded corners looks blurry I suppose. But it’s plain as the nose on your face which is easiest to read, even if you are so accustomed to reading with jaggies all your life.
(I wonder if giving out this link is going to eat up all my iDisk download allotment? It’s for a good cause, so why not.)
To rageous….Agreed. Changing typefaces that are in some cases hundreds of years old is horrible. I too am a designer, and that really pisses me off. Good for Apple for keeping these typefaces alive in their original style.
I’ve always felt that Macs, especially Safari, renders sites much more pleasing and easier to read. Not so clunky as IE and now I understand why. I think this will really come to a head in the next few years… and it is a battle MS has already lost with their current rendering philosophy. Apple is waiting for technology to catch up and once it does it will be all set.
This article states that Apple is rendering fonts and trying to keep the shape of the font. Maybe there is a bit of ‘blurring’, though I see it as softening and it looks great. This is on today’s monitors. Once 10.5 is out and about and resolution independence becomes mainstream monitors can start having greater density. Once a computer monitor with a density of 300 dpi (or even just 200 dpi) becomes available and even slightly affordable then the Apple way of rendering will look even better. The system will have even more pixels to render a font. The end result will be an even nicer looking, and easier to read screen.
Not all windows users like the way IE renders web sites. I’ve building web sites for years. I often have to send my mainly windows using clients screenshots. If I’m in ‘the mood’ I purposely send them a screen shot of their site as it looks on Safari for OS X. It always looks gorgeous. I especially do it if they’ve given me grief about using a Mac and they page I’m showing has a lot of bold titles and normal text.
Other times I show them screenshots of their sites in IE and Safari. The difference in visual appeal is obvious, especially if a page has bold text for titles instead of images.
Nine times out of ten they comment how great the site looks in the screenshot or video but wonder why can’t they see it looking like that live in IE? Dude… you know the drill.
Especially with small fonts <12 points I prefer sharpness over design.
This is another area in which Microsoft has gone down the wrong road…
Is it possible that if ClearType is on that it further smooths the text that Safari has already smoothed? If that’s what it is then my next question would be, can Apple get Safari to turn off Cleartype while it renders its pages?
If design isn’t important at all and only the “content” then why do people work so hard at designing web pages and magazines? If only “content” was important shouldn’t we all just be reading pure text pages? No wonder IE is no good the people that made and use it don’t care about design only “content.”
doc square, how pretentious.
Safari’s font-blurring is horrible. CONTENT is more important than style. If readability suffers, how is that a good thing?
Readability does not suffer in Mac type, it does in the windows world because most typefaces are designed for readability at the outset. Any changes to the stroke weight or letter height etc., will take away from the readability (as in windows). MDN data would be more readable if it was in a serif face, Gothic lettering will never be as readable as a serifed face. How many newspapers do you see with san-serif? Since the start of desktop publishing, everyone and his brother has become an expert — with little or no backgound in type or design.
To a Windows user (me), the new Safari on Windows looks horribly blurry. That’s just the truth. Now, I also happen to be a Mac user for the last year, and while I love the Mac platform and have purchased several Apple products (waiting for the iPhone now) I have to say one of the first things I noticed with my new Mac is how blurry it seemed! I’ve gotten used to it over time, but even today it does not seem as easy to read as Windows to me.
That’s a pretty major problem to adoption – and I firmly want to see the Mac platform wipe out a lot of Windows market share.
This is a laughable comparison. It’s a fact that crude, blocky text is very crisp… jagged but very crisp. Apple’s sophisticated anti-aliasing algorithms smooth the jaggies but reduce the perception of sharpness in the process. Unfortunately for most Windows users, what is required in order to appreciate the benefits of smooth, natural-looking text is good taste. Alas, this quality is in woefully short supply in the Windows world and among its users.
@Wingsy,
Thanks. That illustration makes it very clear that the Apple way is the superior way. I found the Safari page MUCH more pleasant to read.
@Wingsy – hey thanks that was great to see the comparison. There is no way I could stare at the standard Windows renderings all day long. Safari looks way better IMO.
Thanks for giving up the bandwidth.
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MDN: “bill” – as in, I hope you don’t get one from Apple.
Safari looks better on Systems without ClearType turned on. Safari has its own rendering engine and renders these further. While I DO think that ClearType should be ON by default in Windows as it is in Mac OSX , people who care enough about it will have it on… resulting in Safari overblurring the already smoothed fonts.
THESE ARE THE PEOPLE WHO ARE COMPLAINING ABOUT THE BLURRINESS
For your average user who doesn’t change anything they will look at the fonts and say, oooohhhh… it’s pretty… or Oooohh…. it’s weird.
Safari DOESN’T give users the choice. What it SHOULD do for consitency’s sake is just use ClearType instead of forcing it on users…. however, I can understand the reasoning. They don’t want to stick to the UI standards in Windows, but pretentiously put their own UI and rendering, making usability more difficult.
Then again, it introduces people to the OSX platform.
Ideally, it would detect whether clearType is on and disable it in Safari (or turn it to Light) if so.
PS. No offense to Graphic Designers here… but the big problem with many graphic designers is that they often don’t put themselves in the users shoes and tend to think THEY know what’s best, and that the end user obviously doesn’t understand.
Teh Steve likes font blurring – End Of Story.
Yet another way in which Windows (and most Windows users) have no taste. The Mac is about beauty, design, AND functionality.
And this is one of the main reasons why Macs are superior for design/graphic arts/publishing.
someone tell me where i can upload my comparison
…what you see is what you get… And that’s why we see a brown Zune. And a rosier than pink a tad lighter than blood-red one. And it squirts too. What next? Mottled pastels?
The jagged Windows font rendering actually takes away from readability because it distorts the design of the letterforms. The “fuzziness” in Mac type is an optical illusion created by the eye’s moving away from pixelated lines. A couple of days away from Windows and the eye will adjust to the far more accurate and readable type on a Mac.
@ Matt,
I agree. I am also a Mac zealot. And I dislike many things about Windows.
But the computer screen is not a book or printed page. I don’t want to read blurry fonts. In addition while the OS X GUI is beautiful, it is inefficient. FAR too much space is taken by making fonts large enough to that they are readable because of anti-aliasing. I want a lot of information/tools on the screen. Smooth fonts on menu bars are totally unnecessary and only solved by having huge expensive monitors.
Wow, this topic has sure brought the Windows fanbois and astroturfers out in force…
Am I missing something? In Windows XP, I installed Safari and ran it side by side with IE and Safari font rendering looks good and reads better.
Of course this was on a Mac mini with a gorgeous 20″ Apple Cinema display. Maybe all of the people having the opposite effect are using Dell, HP, or other cheapo monitors.
My screen looked just like Wingsy’s, minus the Firefox.
@Wingsy,
In your illustration is Cleartype for Windows turned on?
Thanks,
Hey guys, remember the desktop revolution that brought us WYSIWYG?
So what they are saying is you DON’T get that with Windows and NEVER HAVE! Windows compromises every font to fit the pixels on the screen. Pathetic!
What’s really funny to me is that what Windows users are calling “blurry” is actually just the font as the font designer intended – just like it would be in print. If magazines and newspapers, etc. started looking like that, they’d surely complain.
@ron – serif fonts are usually regarded as being easier to read in print, but sans serif fonts are widely regarded as being easier to read on screen. Those are actually pretty simplistic views, however, and Typographers will say that it depends more on the specific font in question, and how it’s used.
Whomever writes these MDN Takes is a fscking genius
—
Whoever
This is subjective. I know people who use a Mac despite the ‘blurring’, but they pretty much hate it. When I first heard of the problem, I simply didn’t understand, but I was open enough to listen (even though my gut said “How the **** is that meant to be blurry ?). Some people perceive things differently, and simply find OS-X’s font rendering annoying and blurry. Others of us find the MS method ugly as hell.
It comes down to what’s easier to read (for an individual). I find windows to be fatiguing. Some people find OS-X fatiguing.
It’s not a black and white area, but it might be nice if Apple allowed it to be switched off for those that struggle with it. As has already been said though, Steve likes it, and that’s the end of that.
Safari on Windows has a softer clearer quality, compared to IE which sharper and brighter. Spend too long on IE = headaches or eye fatigue. Spend too long on Safari = Oops! were did all the time go?
I used to work for a professor that believed the Apple Way of Font Display (could not resist, sorry) indicated sloppiness and may effect correct functioning in statistical analysis packages.
AARRGG!!!
It’s rather like how people like looking at and living in old houses with a little sag and movement and architects freak out where there’s a line that isn’t straight or a curve that is not mathematically precise.
And reading is not just about the definition of the text, first thing the eye looks for is the shape of the word, if it recognizes the shape then it does not need to read the letters. THAT’S WHY TEXT IN UPPERCASE IS MORE DIFFICULT TO READ EVEN THOUGH IT IS BETTER DEFINED.
Whomever writes these MDN Takes is a fscking genius
—
Whoever
Whateva
Looking at the link comparison of the three, I think Safari looks the best of all of them. It think it’s the easiest to read, has the boldest print, and the controls on the top frame the windows better than the others.
There is NO doubt that Safari provides a “truer” rendering of the fonts. This is simply a matter of what Windows users have become accustomed to using browsers with cheesier font rendering technology. On low rez screens I suppose that MS ClearType helped sharpen soft font rendering, but on modern high rez monitors the Safari type is MUCH better looking and more pleasant to read. Safari on Windows delivers a much richer web experience. I find it unbelievable that Safari’s rendering is being termed “blurrry”. It’s just not crippled by excessive sharpening that makes all fonts look like stick figures. My advice for Windows users is to live with Safari for a week; you will never go back to IE or FireFox.
I just did a side-by-side comparison on a new Dual Core Windows unit with a 24″ Dell LCD.
Based upon my own PERSONAL preferences, Safari for Windows is much easier on my eyes that Windows XP/FireFox.
And, I mean MUCH EASIER.
P.S. I am 50 years young.
THis is so funny. Yep, one screen looks different than the other. ARGUE, YELL,SHOUT!!!
But when you print it out, the Apple screen looks more like the printed page where on the Microsoft system, you get this garbled printed page. GEEE, I guess its just a crappy printer. LOL
Maybe should buy a new printer cause it could not be Microsofts fault!!!
” width=”19″ height=”19″ alt=”grin” style=”border:0;” /> Those printer companies have bad programmers, YEA, thats it, it could NEVER be Microsofts fault that the screen looks different than what you get out of the printer. LOL
I am still laughing.
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en
(I doubt any font designer designs his/her fonts to be blurry or sharpie. There is this hinting thing, at most, but…)
Look, this is about different priorities: readability vs. fidelity. At certain screen sizes, one has no option but to choose one, and they are mission-dependent (DTP vs. web browsing or wordprocessing, for example).
Also, I wonder if screen gamma was taken into consideration for these comparisons.
“Once a computer monitor with a density of 300 dpi (or even just 200 dpi) becomes available and even slightly affordable then the Apple way of rendering will look even better”. I believe it’s just the opposite: Windows’ way of rendering will look just like Apple’s because the increased pixel density will make both Microsoft’s and Apple’s algorithms equally effective: you won’t notice the difference. Actually, I wonder if they’d antialias text at all once one reaches newspaper-level screen DPIs upwards.
sadly a lot of PC users will continue to think that IE looks better (sharper) and Safari worse (blurry) even though IE is “clearly” mangling the fonts (pun inteded). it’s a matter of what you’re used to, I guess – or whether you expect pages to look as the creator intended.
kinda like trying to get someone to appreciate fine French cheese if they’ve grown up on processed cheese-food slices…
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(What did Steve Jobs say about Microsoft having no taste?)
The fact that Windows has an option called “Cleartype” pretty much states that with the option off, you have craptype.
@ Wingsy
Thanks Wingsy,
Your effort shows the difference.
For everyone:
If you look at Wingsy’s link, it really is obvious.
Safari Is what you really should be seeing.
I am all for whatever is best. So if I really did think that MS’s way of doing things was better than Safari, I would say it. But it is obvious to me that Safari’s text not only looks better, but is much easier to read than the others.
Frankly I am having a hard time understanding all the “true to the font” arguments. Safari just looks better and reads easier. Enough said.
Geez…I would rather look at the sharp picture 500 lb fat broad in a bikini rather than Angelina Jolie in a bikini because the latter has slightly blurred edges…..
Blurry is good….downright preferable too!
(my apologies to all bikini-clad 500 lb fat broads everywhere…I needed an example)
Wingsy: By your examples, does this mean we should probably blame al Qaeda? (;-) – re: conspiracy nut on the alleged liberal bias in the iPhone ads)
Fonts are designed as a a whole, so as not to be hammered into pixel boundaries. You might as well go back to pre-WYSIWYG interfaces if you want MS’s approach. Maximum readability is maintained by maintaining font shape with hinting and kerning, as Apple does. That’s the whole point of desktop publishing.
Cleartype does not affect the text in Safari on Windows. It does affect the text in IE, of course. On my own computer, I turned off Cleartype and compared the same web page between IE and Safari. Then I turned it back on and compared. The IE page became more readable, whereas the Safari page was the same readability with and without Cleartype.
This font issue is going to be a hot topic for awhile, like it was with notable bloggers a couple of years ago.
Remember the school experiment where there were 3 containers? One had ice water in it. One was as hot as it could be without doing damage. In the middle was a container with lukewarm water, essentially, room-temperature. Two kids participated at a time. One had to soak his hand in the ice cold water for several minutes. The other student had to put his hand in the hot water for the same amount of time. Once they were both acclimated to the water their hands were in, they were instructed to put that same hand in the room-temperature water. Remember the result?
The kid with the ice water felt that the new water was really hot, almost painfully so. The student whose hand was soaking in the hot, hot water felt like his hand was freezing cold in the lukewarm water. Then the teacher proved with a thermometer what the real temperature or the lukewarm water.
If you didn’t do this in school, you can do it all by yourself with both of your hands, instead of one hand from 2 participants. It’s a very strange feeling.
So, unless there’s some kind of hardware incompatibility which makes Safari’s text look even softer than how it is on a Mac, then we have essentially the same situation as the experiment with the 3 different temperature containers… without the middle room-temperature container… only the very hot and the very cold. Can you imagine how the result would be magnified if you switched containers suddenly? It would be a shock.
We have essentially the same situation here. Microsoft’s philosophy vs. Apple’s font philosophy are diametrically opposed. They are steaming hot vs. icy cold. For the first time, they’re experiencing the opposite container of water.
Windows users are acclimated to dot matrix text rendering (most don’t know about ClearType and couldn’t care less). Now they are being exposed to the complete opposite philosophy and its resulting difference in type…. AND… they are able to compare the text side-by-side.
Acclimated to MS text rendering, Apple’s font rendering looks blurry to them. They are used to the page they print looking different text-wise from what’s on the screen. That’s “normal” for them. OTOH, Mac users are used to the softer font rendering from Apple’s font philosophy. We expect our print-out to look just like the text on the screen.
Windows iPhone users will be using Safari. Jobs is giving them a taste of what they will see when surfing the web on their iPhones. In the meantime, expect a lot of complaining from the opposite long-term reading experience Windows have been suffering from without knowing it.
Interesting story about the origin of subpixel text rendering.
I have a review of Safari on Windows XP in which I briefly commented on the text rendering. In part II of the review I comment further, and include a screenshot comparing Safari with Firefox:
Safari on Windows XP Review, part II
“Now that Safari for Windows is available, which goes to great trouble to use Apple’s rendering algorithms, you can actually compare the philosophies side-by-side on the very same monitor and see what I mean.”
Or you could have done it years ago using any one of several virtual Windows apps. Right now, I am using Safari on my primary monitor, and IE in Windows XP is just to my right on the second. In Windows, I can see pixels. They are ugly, and they have no taste. And I don’t mean that in a small way, I mean it in a really big way.
Would someone please post a link comparing Windows using Cleartype next to Windows Safari.
Or, again, Wingsy, was your example using Cleartype on Windows turned on?
if u stay close to the design of the font, u make it more readable. so this theory just does not work.
Apple uses (and patented) more than just sub-pixel rendering, they use the properties of LCD screens to make the display even more accurate (R, G and B are not at the exact same location)
the image linked by Wingsy makes it very obvious, text on windows just looks horrendous !
Here is a default view of XP IE and Safari on 10.4.9.
MW: ‘bad’
[doc], could u take a look at that image, and repeat what u wrote ?
it’s NOT blurring, it’s antialiasing, and it definitely makes the text a lot easier to read.
Thomas from Deutschland wrote:
Especially with small fonts <12 points I prefer sharpness over design
—-
that’s why font SMOOTHING, (not blurring) is disabled for small text
anyone who pretends text on IE or Firefox (or the rest of windows) is as good as on the mac is insane !
Here is the same view with ClearType turned on.
Actually, if MDN had really read the article they would have noted that the author said there was advantages to both. And there are.
Score 1 for dogma over accuracy.
[doc square], i doubt; actually i’m 100% sure, that safari uses the windows font code at all.
it’s just not posible to smooth a font AND have it displayed by the OS.
(on the Mac the smoothing is system wide), but on windows safari HAS to use it’s own font code, it’ can’t be done in any other way.
CONTENT is more important than style
Which is hilarious when you consider the sources.
MS has zero content, but does a great job delivering it. Think Vista.
Apple is all content, but the delivery is a bit hazy. Think Mac OS marketing.
MS’s condition is the direct result of PowerPoint and having the sales guys in charge. Not quite sure where Apple’s position came from.
XvsXP has an entire page devoted to viewing fonts, with comparisons of the actual fonts in both systems.
Go to the bottom of the page. There’s an enlarged example of the number 4’s sub-pixel fonts for Mac (both Standard and Strong font smoothing) compared to Windows one-size-fits-all ClearType.
People,
Why not give both systems a setting for the kind of font smoothing used, if any? Set it to whatever works for you and enjoy.
Next well be piss arguing about which screen gamma values are best.
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Turn font smoothing off under 9 points. — Body copy text should remain jaggy just the way Windows users seem to prefer them.
But the headers and mastheads will look the way the designers intended. The end result should be web pages that actually look like they were made in this decade and not some crappy document from back in 1989 using DOS! lol!
Fonts should be rendered as close to the actual typeface as possible.
This is the problem when only the creative community uses a computer platform that renders fonts AND colors accurately.
Just thank God Hollywood doesn’t produce our movies and TV shows using Windows!
“PS. No offense to Graphic Designers here… but the big problem with many graphic designers is that they often don’t put themselves in the users shoes and tend to think THEY know what’s best, and that the end user obviously doesn’t understand.” —doc square
Most graphic designers knock themselves out trying to please clients who frequently have no clear idea what they really want and wouldn’t know a good design if it slapped them in the face.
I downloaded the examples posted in this thread to my MacBook Pro. There are clear differences in the text, but not much blurring. I then moved the images to a secondary display, a two year old 17″ Dell LCD. The difference was night and day.
With ClearType off Safari rendering looks beautiful and makes IE look like dot matrix output from the 1980s.
With ClearType turned on the Safari output looks noticeably blurry while the IE output just looks weird. I can’t look at either one for long without wondering what’s wrong with my eyes.
this whole thread should just not exist, some people are just being completely blind here.
how can anyone pretend this is “blurring” ?
every black pixel on windows is black on mac os, the additional pixels are antialiasing, just like when u reduce an image with photoshop.
i’m tired of those lame attempts to manipulate the Apple stock.
@ Martin
Actually, every black pixel on a Mac isn’t black. If you are on a Mac, press and hold CTRL and scroll the scroll wheel… zooming in on some text and you will see various colors fringing the characters.
@ Martin… I realize I am preaching to the choir as far as you are concerned… but I thought I would show others how to see it for themselves.
MDN Magic word… glass… as in clear as… ;^)>
@ Swordmaker
Desktop Zoom resamples the desktop drawing, and is therefore not an accurate representation of how the actual-size image is drawn. You can see the levels change as you zoom in.
If you want to see the anti-aliasing at a larger size, make a screen grab and zoom in on that. No resampling.
Bart said, “In your illustration is Cleartype for Windows turned on?”
Like I said, it’s a stock install of Windows. I haven’t touched any settings.
The best thing about Safari 3 is that it’s getting the Cocoa for Windows environment out there and tested by a large diverse user base.
The font rendering (anti-aliasing, et cetera) and color correction prove it’s more than just the app at work here. There are underlying display libraries that are being used.
Write once, run everywhere with Cocoa.
Consumers will flock to Apple (as they have been) when they see that they can run any software they want, and have a secure, beautiful (if arguably no longer “elegant”) UI. Especially useful will be all the great Cocoa-based applications that will present the Mac mindset to previously ignorant Windows victims — anything by Omni, all the amazing shareware, iLife!
I’ve been preaching this since Apple bought Next in ’98 (NextStep/Cocoa for Windows — aka “yellow box” — and Intel processors), but I thought no one was listening. If this is indeed Apple’s plan, I think it’ll be successful beyond all estimation.
Now get ready for lots of naysayers who don’t know the technology to tell me I’m an idiot. But before they do, they should take a look at the history of Mac-on-Intel discussions on this board.
“. . . wouldn’t know a good design if it slapped them in the face.”
I had an o.k. design spank me behind a dumpster once. Too many tequila shots that night.
Just thought I’d point out that the example given, with FF, IE, and Safari was horrendously misleading. Obviously it was set up by a Mac nutjob specifically to make IE and FF look bad. ClearType was clearly not being used.
I’m not going to say that Safari’s font smoothing is altogether terrible, but Jobs’ overfocus on form as oppsed to function really does make it less readable. That, and the whole document should never look like it’s being displayed in a bold-style font, which Macs generally have a tendancy to do.
A side by side comparison between Safari for Windows and Firefox 3 rendering small type. Screen-shot has ClearType enabled and correctly tuned.
Sorry, the link above was mangled by photobucket.
Here is the updated link: