Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by jshb 5387 days ago
I wonder if they did a study into what percentage of their users have font smoothing turned off, because their HTML text everywhere site looks horrendous on my PC with font smoothing off. It's especially ugly when you can easily see where they are using graphic text on a few select spots.
1 comments
waitwhat 5387 days ago
their HTML text everywhere site looks horrendous on my PC with font smoothing off

If you don't like how text looks without font-smoothing, then maybe you should consider turning on your font-smoothing...

link
damncabbage 5387 days ago
Windows XP doesn't have it on by default. Most users don't know how to change it, even if they know what font-smoothing is in the first place.

We as web developers need to at least be aware of what our sites will look like for a given percentage of our userbase (and make a decision as to whether it's worth making it look good for that percentage).

link
jshb 5387 days ago
That would be no problem I'm sure assuming English was the only language I need to display on my browser. Unfortunately I don't fit into that profile.
link
CamperBob 5387 days ago
On Windows, this issue is a hell of a lot more complicated than "if you don't like it, maybe you should turn smoothing on."

Some users dislike ClearType intensely (and that would include your humble narrator.) Turning ClearType off via a Windows system setting is no problem, but for some incomprehensible reason, IE9 ignores this, and always renders with ClearType enabled. For this reason and others, some users including myself use Firefox.

Firefox 5 didn't behave that way, but for some even stranger reason Mozilla adopted IE's approach in Firefox 6. You will get Cleartype-smoothed HTML text in Firefox, whether you want it or not, unless you use an about.config hack to turn smoothing off entirely.

I've heard FF7 is reverting this "improvement" but haven't tried it yet.

link