But if you zoom all the way into the Hacker News image it doesn't implement anti-aliasing! Lol, that was my favorite complaint on this article; talk about digging for an excuse.
That's a legitimate complaint. The text was anti-aliased in the first image, but it was only done on a whole-pixel basis. Adding a background color apparently convinces chrome to switch to subpixel antialiasing.
Whole pixel anti-aliasing looks bad and is inconsistent: both with other parts of Chrome, and with the rest of the broader operating system.
Actually, that was on the New Tab page, not on Hacker News itself... And it was pointed out that it's easily fixable, and they haven't done it. They actually tried to anti-alias it, but failed to give it a background color, so it doesn't work correctly.
Whole pixel anti-aliasing looks bad and is inconsistent: both with other parts of Chrome, and with the rest of the broader operating system.