Why Is Internet Explorer’s Font Rendering So Much Better Than Firefox and Opera?

thanks

[…] Via liveslick […]

thanks for this! it really works, looks much better now.

Are you kidding me? The font rendering is horrible. It is more of a distraction than does it help. I leave it disabled.

@yiffzer: It’s true, some people prefer it disabled.
I think that many people don’t know about this feature and it never hurts to turn it on and test if out for a while. Once I found out about cleartype, I couldn’t go back.

I couldn’t use it longer than two minutes. I guess I’m in the minority with yiffzer that prefer it disabled.

Ha ha.. All of that is horrible… Check out Safari… on Mac OS X or for that matter Mac OS X.. if you think that internet Explorer looks good than, all I can say is ha… the question should be Why does everything just look better on a Mac?

Cool. Thanx.

You might want to give the ClearType Tuner from the Microsoft website a shot, it optimizes the effect on LCDs.

http://www.microsoft.com/typography/ClearTypePowerToy.mspx

If ClearType looks a little “crispy” it may be because the RGB-fields on your LCD are in an unusual order, which leads to wrong pixel smoothing.

For more info have a look at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ClearType

IE7 forces anti-aliasing on most font-rendering within the browser. However Firefox, a cross-platform browser, has no native font anti-aliasing ability. And it shouldn’t since most OSs such as Windows, MacOS X, and Linux (freetype rendering) have this ability natively. Windows XP doesn’t have font-antialiasing enabled by default. However in Windows Vista, AA is on by default. In MacOS and Ubuntu, it’s enabled by default. Safari on Windows copies MacOS AA into its browser. Safari on Windows AA looks much different than Windows (blurrier, thicker).

I’m keeping this disabled. Somehow I don’t like black text surrounded by green and red dots. Anti-alias properly, windows.

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I have Vista and it has Clear Type set as standard. It’s basically in the same place as your directions.

What the heck is wrong with you people? The Cleartype antialiasing looks like crap!

It’s fuzzy and difficult to read, you have to strain your eyes a lot more because you keep trying to focus on it to make it clearer and it’s not working.

This moronic Cleartype thing is even enabled by default in IE7, I had to search through help files to figure out why every webpage I looked it made me think I was still buzzed from last night.

Cleartype is intended for those of us with LCD’s… yes, it looks like complete ass on a CRT.

Are you insane? have you ever used MacOSX?
IE is worst for font rendering, the texts are totally hazzy.

If it is font rendering, I’ll put the ranking as

1. Apple Safari 3.0.4
2. Opera 9.24
3. Firefox 2.0.8
4. Internet Explorer 7

hmm thanks

How can anyone claim that font aliasing is a progress. It makes my eyes water from trying to focus on fuzzy characters. I can’t read more than a few lines without squinting. It was the main reason why I stopped using a Mac in 2000 (OSX 10.0). And now IE7 pushes it back on me although I have the Display settings option disabled !?! I use FF but still have to use FF for a few minutes in a row to check on some sites. Horrible. Now how do I disable this ?

Repeat after me: antialiasing is a method invented so that you can resize raster graphics (lines, fonts, etc) without weird aliasing effects. It was never intended for _reading_.

Thanks a lot! I’ve been wondering this for a long time:)
Ok guys, is there any other way to force firefox to render its own window only, like IE?

Hi, I found this:
http://www.microsoft.com/typography/ClearTypePowerToy.mspx

Thanks so much for this. I thought it was a style sheet thing. And why in the world would it look better in IE??

This helped tremendously. And yes, I’m on an lcd.

yesss it looks like complete ass on a CRT.

Let’s face it everyone, the world would be a better place if IE didn’t ever exist. Too many problems, and even their supposed fixes only create more problems. Now if the rest of world could catch on and stop using it and just use Firefox and Safari, even Opera.

Thanks a million! I have been trying to figure out why FF looked so bad! I even went as far as making images for the text! LOL! Thanks!

Man you ROCK! I’ve been trying to find a solution to the ugly Firefox issue and your solution fixed it perfectly. Thanks!

What a fantastic tip! One of my very few “againsts” for Firefox has been completely removed: even the very small fonts look good in Firefox now!

thank you, looks fab - really appreciated this

You are a ridiculous person for thinking that IE renders fonts better. I’d go as far as to say that you can’t tell the difference between pink and green, or apples and steak. You need to hide away for a while and think about this. You might just be borderline psychotic.

Would be awesome if the font on this site was not this small..You clearly can’t have clear fonts beyong a certain size. This font is on the edge, but it starts to look fuzzy. But fontsize 12 will be fine.

“Internet Explorer’s is much more smooth and looks a lot better.”
You do have a good sense of a humor!
These IE7 rendered fonts are really the ugliest. And the craziest thing is that this ClearType is set by default!
I’m glad discovering long time ago such great browser as Firefox or Opera, because IE is a pi*** of **it. I’m wondering, how the mankind still can use this stupid browser, and being a web developer/designer it only brings me pain in the…you know, where :).

Thank you man!
I really needed this.

Dear

That is great. It really works

I was trying different options but now i am successfull to get that one.

Thanks for your guidlines

On my monitor and OS I have to agree with the author. It’s not cool or remotely useful to attack the author and whine about how great Macs are when clearly this post only applies to PCs. For many people on a PC with an LCD monitor this is preferred, so deal with it. BTW, I prefer Opera and I am not an IE fanboy, but I don’t lose my little mind when someone publishes something that doesn’t attack it.

Good to know! Now to be honest, I’ve just had this thing on for 2 minutes and my eyes committed suicide. I’m disabling it right away.

I have to say thank you very much!
???

First things first, “Intelligent”, you are a stupid wanker!

This person is trying to be helpful by putting this information out there and all you can do is call this person names, whether or not it works on every system is another issue all together!

I for one have just enabled it on my XP box with a CRT screen and it makes things way clearer in browsers like firefox.

As for the other idiots who blindly talk before atleast trying other systems out first (Mac fanatics and such), you need to go back to school and redo/do science.

To “Live Slick”, thanks for the tip!

Thanks for that tip. This clear type looks rather icky when applied to all windows. At least I’m now able to explain to clients and QA guys why do fonts look different under IE

Thank you so much for a clear solution to my problem (bad fonts on Opera).

Thanks for the tip. The font rendering is the reason I keep away from Firefox.

If you just do step three you can get the desired view of IE in Firefox without losing all the jazz. Well, at least what made me stay away from Firefox. Anyway, I hope it works.

I am a new user to Firefox and, yes, I did not think it looked as good as Internet Explorer. With your tweak it now does.

Magic!

Thanks. You are indeed the man!

I tend to agree with the author, but also wanted to point out that some fonts look better with anti-aliasing turned on and some don’t.

Verdana, is a font commonly used on the web which was specifically designed to be easier to read on screen. In my opinion with small size type (11px) is looks better with anti-aliasing turned off.

Ironically Verdana was created by Microsoft!
Check out: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verdana

In general font size makes a huge difference. Larger sizes tend to look better with anti-aliasing on and small sizes look worse.

Hopefully some day we’ll be able to selectively turn antialiasing on or off for differnt fonts in a browser. It’s been in Photoshop for years.

Oh dear God !!!
Many Thanks , You are a life savior

Thank you so much! It would never comes on my mind to try to find solution in that way.

thanks a lot! man , I’m looking for something for this problem for a long time ,now it’s resolved ,thanks!

All of those look like trash. Safari has the best font rendering on Windows, though it looks pretty different than ClearType (and people complained about it being different…)

very helpful thank.

I love Firefox but hated the text rendering, your tip has changed all that, now the text looks smooth and easily readable. I looked for ages trying to find a solution and yours proved to be the simplest and only effective solution. Thanks for a great tip!

Thanks a lot man
very very very helpful
good luck

Thanks, it helped very much I’m glad to find such information easy. Thank you again!