their HTML text everywhere site looks horrendous on my PC with font smoothing off
If you don't like how text looks without font-smoothing, then maybe you should consider turning on your font-smoothing...
If you don't like how text looks without font-smoothing, then maybe you should consider turning on your font-smoothing...
We as web developers need to at least be aware of what our sites will look like for a given percentage of our userbase (and make a decision as to whether it's worth making it look good for that percentage).
Some users dislike ClearType intensely (and that would include your humble narrator.) Turning ClearType off via a Windows system setting is no problem, but for some incomprehensible reason, IE9 ignores this, and always renders with ClearType enabled. For this reason and others, some users including myself use Firefox.
Firefox 5 didn't behave that way, but for some even stranger reason Mozilla adopted IE's approach in Firefox 6. You will get Cleartype-smoothed HTML text in Firefox, whether you want it or not, unless you use an about.config hack to turn smoothing off entirely.
I've heard FF7 is reverting this "improvement" but haven't tried it yet.