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Comment by tuacker | Hacker News Reader

Why do fonts look like ants chipped away some pixels in chrome/win7? They look better in Firefox but I remember OSX looking better still, can be wrong about that though since I hadn't access to one in a long time. But fonts in Chrome are plain ugly, someone please turn on AA.

FF on the left, Chrome on the right: http://i.imgur.com/SxlaT.png

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Chrome on Windows doesn't use the DirectWrite text rendering engine as opposed to Firefox or IE. See details here:

http://eligrey.com/blog/post/better-font-smoothing-in-google...

This has been an open issue since 2009. I'm surprised it still hasn't been fixed even though it's a daily nuisance in the world of beautiful web fonts and large type sizes:

http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=25541

http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=105944

EDIT: an official DirectWrite port of Chrome/Win is currently under development:

https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/group/chromium-dev/...

You might be interested in gdipp -- after using OS X for a couple years I couldn't stand Windows font rendering, but this really does make it better.

Link: http://code.google.com/p/gdipp/

Hm, not sure what happened there. Chrome isn't applying any anti-aliasing to those fonts. No greyscale, no sub-pixel, nothing.

Noticed it, too. Pretty disappointing after waiting years to really be able to play with great typography. Especially painful coming from a Google site rendered inside a Google browser.

And yet on WinXP it's the inverse: http://i.imgur.com/fge34.png

They look fine in Chrome on Ubuntu at least to my eyes.

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