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Comment by Tomdarkness | Hacker News Reader

Chrome Canary has experimental support for DirectWrite which should make your fonts, and text in general look much nicer.

See the issue here:

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

For details on how to enable DirectWrite in Chrome Canary. Might be worthwhile to see what your fonts look like using DirectWrite.

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I have had that issue starred for years, as I assume most of the others have. The failure of Chromium to support DirectWrite in a reasonable timeframe has kept me pure in my unwavering support of Firefox, even when Chrome was considered the hipper browser. It's easier now to remain with Mozilla, what with anti-Google sentiment becoming mainstream.

Jokes aside, it's embarrassing how long that issue has been left to rot. All fonts in Chrome-Windows look awful once one is used to Firefox or Internet Explorer's rendering.

Not even when you're not used to the other browsers' font rendering. On some of Google's web pages the fonts are actually unreadable unless you scale the page to 250% or so.

Similar type of deal with [going 64-bit](https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=18323) on Mac OS X. Has languished for multiple years. DirectWrite shipped in 2009, one month after Snow Leopard with 64-bit recommended for apps by default.

Plus ASLR is much less effective with only a 32 bit address space. (Firefox on OS X is a 64 bit application.)

>>>> All fonts in Chrome-Windows look awful once one is used to Firefox or Internet Explorer's rendering.

Kind of hard to imagine IE actually renders something better than Chrome. I thought that would be enough to get them motivated to get this corrected. Guess I was wrong.

IE11 is a really good browser. Fast and rendering is flawless

Note that the discussion begins over 4 years ago. Still can't believe it's been this long.

>text in general look much nicer

Does this mean it'll have the same terrible antialiased text rendering IE has? That only looks good on high DPI? That's one of the main reasons I've been on Chrome: no blurry text.

This is most relevant on Retina/hi-dpi displays, that's where DirectWrite shines and Chrome flails. For regular-dpi displays, I think DirectWrite is actually a bit worse than the traditional Win font rendering.

I'm not disagreeing with you, but I noticed this on a garden-variety 24" 1920x1200 LCD, Windows 7.

Not sure I agree..while it will depend on your display, I certainly find the left in this image (DW) easier to read than the right (GDI)

http://i4.minus.com/igp9IxeEX51ES.png

(I know these comparisons have been done to death in the past)

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