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Comment by mrpippy | Hacker News Reader

My overriding feeling after reading this is: displaying text is a key job of a web browser. A browser that showed no text would be useless. And yet, after learning that Chromium's text looked wrong on Windows (by far the most important platform for Edge and Chrome), it took 4 years for the Chromium and/or Edge teams to fix it.

4 years of user research?

3 years to respect the user's ClearType Tuner values?

Being a regression from pre-Chromium Edge, this should have been a release blocker on Chromium-based Edge. Instead, text looked bad for 4 years.

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> Being a regression from pre-Chromium Edge, this should have been a release blocker on Chromium-based Edge. Instead, text looked bad for 4 years.

Text didn't look bad. It just didn't look identical to the rest of the OS.

It's not obvious why that should be a blocker at all, rather than a low-priority inconsistency.

And for people who switch between devices all day long but use the same browser, you could even argue that it's more important for text rendering to be consistent in a browser across devices, rather than consistent within a device. I don't personally think that, but I can see why there might discussion over whether this is even an issue at all, much less a blocking one.

Furthermore it's not just that it didn't look identical to the rest of the OS. There is in fact no culture for Windows apps to conform to the platform specific look and feel. A long time ago people were discussing inconsistent ClearType use in Microsoft's own apps like Office and Internet Explorer: it turned out that both Office and IE had their own settings for enabling or ignoring ClearType. In my opinion, that choice should belong to the OS and should never be given to app developers.

Yeah as a person who only uses Microsoft Windows when absolutely necessary, who consequently has not been conditioned to overlook its many quirks, I find it hilarious that someone would judge an app for not being consistent with the look and feel. To see how unrealistic this complaint is, all you have to do is launch the Control Panel, then launch the Device Manager, and compare them.

Not sure why, this is like fallacies 101. Just because many other surrounding applications are inconsistent in their presentation, that doesn't mean this situation should be worsened.

Why is it a fallacy? I am pointing out that the reference on which consistency would be based isn't clear.

To an unfortunately large degree, browsers and browser engines are simply not concerned with respecting the host platform's defaults and conventions. The browsers are here to replace (and reinvent) the host platforms, not integrate with them. Developers writing apps to run in a browser engine are more likely to care about their app looking the same across all devices and operating systems, even if their users may care more about the app following the same conventions as other apps on their platform of choice.

Edge getting this wrong is embarrassing for Microsoft, but is not at all surprising when you take into account how notoriously fractious Microsoft is and how unlikely it is that anyone in Microsoft could enforce a cohesive vision for UI standards to the extent of being able to make this a release blocker for Edge.

That's actually pretty fast. It took 10 years for Java[1] and 5 years for JavaFX[2] to fix some trivial but rather severe text rendering bugs. Most of that time was getting enough courage to fix them myself. :-)

Reporting text rendering bugs is frustratingly difficult!

[1] https://github.com/jgneff/openjdk-freetype

[2] https://github.com/javafxports/openjdk-jfx/issues/229

Firefox has a 7 year old bug that's not fixed yet that messes up the typography of Google Docs et al. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1445596

Maybe I just have low standards but to me text looked absolutely fine while it "looked bad". I have to try very hard to see any difference at all. I don't think it's shameful that it looked this way for 4 years, I think it's shameful that such a degree of wasted effort went into "fixing" it. What a ludicrous use of manpower.

This is the expected downside of them abandoning Edge's rendering engine and switching to a new one. A lot of things will look slightly different. They accepted that premise from the start.

It seems unlikely someone is going to block a release because an expected thing happened.

And that’s why edge doesn’t publish their issue tracker. Ive reported bugs in user profile data and Wallet that have been ignored.Edge Changelog just says “fixes” but I haven’t observed anything noticeable until this rendering fix .

> My overriding feeling after reading this is: displaying text is a key job of a web browser.

Displaying ads is the key job of a web browser, and they are mostly video these days.

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