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Comment by nanidin | Hacker News Reader

It's slightly pathetic that when viewing the website with Google's own browser, the font in the "SOMETIMES THE BIGGEST..." block is rendered incorrectly with stray pixels on top of the S's, O's, and G's.

I'm assuming it's not intentional since zooming in causes the artifacts to disappear, but they come back when zoomed back out to 100%.

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Chrome doesn't render Google web fonts well, it's been that way for as long as I remember. It's a known issue, and it's been reported countless times.

You would expect this to be high priority, since reading text in the most important aspect of the internet. For whatever reason, Google doesn't seem to care, and they have no problem using these poorly rendered fonts all over the place.

This is slightly incorrect as the problem only affects Google Chrome on Windows. Also, the Chrome team is actively working on this problem as seen in in its issue report [1]. The progress can be seen by launching Chrome Canary with the --enable-direct-write flag. chromestatus.com indicates that its scheduled to be released in M36.

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

Chrome for Windows is one of the most common setups for browsing the internet, so this isn't an edge case situation. That post originated in 2009, over 4.5 years ago.

It's good to hear it might be finally addressed, but I wouldn't say they've been actively working on it, when all the other popular browsers had this sorted years ago.

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