It drives me bonkers when I highlight text to read (I don't highlight everything, but I do it unconciously). When I highlight the text in chrome, it feels like my vision suddendly dropped out and I need glasses.

That's always bothered me. Firefox's fonts are so crisp and clear. Chrome's look faded for some reason.

Very true, on windows at least every single browser renders fonts however they feel like. I wish someone would stand up and propose a standard way to render fonts (yes, I know pages don't necessarily have to look exactly pixel perfect across browsers, but it would simplify the design process a lot)

There has been talks of directwrite coming to Chrome for nearly a year now. We have to suffer the poorly hinted fonts looking terrible for a while longer.

I've been using Firefox a lot more often once I found out that poor font rendering was the fault of Chrome and not because of cleartype settings.