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Meanwhile Microsoft has basically given up on sub-pixel smoothing: it's missing from Windows Store/Modern/Metro apps (including Edge) and IE10 and newer and is mostly absent from Office 2013 and newer when running on Windows 8 and above†. More's the pity - not all of us have high DPI screens yet.

† https://www.quppa.net/blog/2012/07/17/office-2013-further-ev...

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I believe part of the reason is that it was never fully compatible with screen rotation, often still assuming RGB order from text-left to text-right. Another part would be that the world is moving towards much higher resolution displays, where the effect of subpixel rendering is negligible.

It's a combination of what you mentioned and incompatibility with APIs like Direct Manipulation. Raymond Chen explains it here: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20150129-00/?p=...

The problems are that ClearType doesn't look good with rotated screens (tablets), semi-transparent backgrounds, or animations.

Edge actually has ClearType on by default in the upcoming update though.

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