Does your browser text look like this?

Hey guys,

After using Mac OS and Windows together for a while, I've realized something - the text in browsers in Mac OS hurts my eyes. It seems very fuzzy and unclear. Does yours look like this?



Has anyone else had problems viewing the text and looking at it? Or are my eyes just weak?

EDIT: A better example:

 

Yeah, I'm using Safari 3 Beta and it looks the same. You may want to try out Camino, its text rendering may be different. See if you like that.

 

Have you ever used the Cleartype feature in Windows?

What's going on here is the 3 sub-pixels (red, green, and blue) are being used as pixels themselves to make the edges of text smoother. This has the side effect of creating a color edge to text, but the end result is the smoothness.

Apple's sub-pixel smoothing tends to make everything bold in my opinion. That said, i've only used Windows and it took some time to let Cleartype grow on me. At first, the color edges to text was absolutely unacceptable, but over time, it was alright.

EDIT: Yeah, this type of smoothing tends to look bad in high-contrast conditions. I'd set the font smoothing to a lighter level in Safari or whatever browser that is.

 

I use Camino, but I checked Safari before posting this and it looked the same. I'll go see if I can change that option (where is it exactly?) and maybe that'll make it better. Thanks for the help!

 

Check out this article put forth by ZDNet's George Ou, on the differences in font rendering by OSX, Vista and XP:

http://blogs.zdnet.com/Ou/?p=682&tag=nl.e590

 

He's been known to be a Mac basher . And also check out the poll that is at the end of the article. The majority of users say OS X renders font better.

EDIT: Although I should clarify, I'm not implying he "meddled" with the results of his test in that article. I just wanted to point out also that the majority of the votes say OS X is better.

 

lol, someone claiming Mac font rendering sucks gets down voted by Mac lovers.

Win Vista's text > Mac OS X's text > WinXP's text > Linux distros' text (free fonts suck)

 

I turned Font Smoothing down to "Light" in the System Preferences - it does look a bit better - does anyone have any more tips as to how to get the Mac OS fonts to look more Windows-like? We can debate which is actually better, but, for me at least, the Mac fonts just hurt my eyes

EDIT: actually, to be honest, I can't see much of a difference now that I changed the Font Smoothing settings - I even tried flipping between Light and Strong, and nothing seemed to change...is there anything else I can do?

 

Is there a browser for the Mac that won't show "blurry" fonts? Is it the same on Firefox?

 

Try turning font smoothing off.

 

I didn't see an option for that - just changing it between light, medium and strong (as well as automatic or standard) - is it in the System Preferences?

 

Is that a Bioshock quote?

 

You can turn off font smoothing for fonts smaller than whatever you select in the appearance preferences.