[danShumway]

On my desktop display I see a difference in the light screens. It's a very subtle difference, but enough that it might theoretically irritate me if I had to stare at text all day. Probably not in practice, it's not a massive problem or anything; but yeah, AA looks better.

Where I notice it the most is on the curly quotes and parentheses. Without AA they look... harsh I guess? Or maybe blocky. You notice the vertical lines making up the curves more. You also lose some of the definition around letters - for example without AA the dot on the "i" is much less noticeable.

On the dark theme it doesn't look nearly as bad, I have a really hard time seeing the difference there at all. Maybe that's because they're scaled differently? Or maybe dark themes just don't need it as much?

[arm]

> “Without AA they look... harsh I guess?”

I’m noticing this misunderstanding quite a bit in the thread. None of those images have antialiasing disabled. What’s been disabled is subpixel antialiasing. So those images are comparing subpixel antialiasing and greyscale antialiasing.

Opinions between the two are mixed:

I’m one of the people that hates greyscale antialiasing (I find it makes text look fuzzier) and prefer subpixel antialiasing (which does a much better job of preserving the intended shape of the font glyphs).

On the other side, there are people who hate subpixel antialiasing (because they can see the colour fringes on the glyphs) and prefer greyscale antialiasing. Here’s an example from 1897235235 lower down in the thread:

“This is actually better for me. I wrote to Steve Jobs a long time ago and asked him if he could switch to gray-scale font smoothing because the tricks they use with colours don't actually work with people like me who are red green colour blind. The end result was that text on apple products looked terrible to me and I couldn't use any of their products until the retina displays came out. In windows, you can use grayscale font smoothing easily.

Anyway, he replied "we don't have any plans to do this" or something like that. Turns out I won in the end.”

Now if antialiasing was actually fully disabled, the difference would be extremely obvious, to say the least.

[danShumway]

Thanks for the catch.

I wonder if this is part of the reason why I can't really tell the difference in the dark mode pictures, at least without zooming in all the way. I guess the colors from subpixel antialiasing would be less noticable when overlayed or transitioning from dark to light rather than from light to dark?

> the tricks they use with colours don't actually work with people like me who are red green colour blind.

Oh crud, this never occurred to me. It doesn't seem to matter how many times I remind myself that red/green doesn't work for everyone, I still find myself forgetting about it all the time.