Font rendering comparison
Jun 28, 2008 | Design
I noticed safari render the font smoother than Firefox when i did the browser compatibility check for upcoming theme.
I use Windows XP with latest Firefox 3 and Safari 3.1.1.
Here’s what it look in the browser.
Font family : Arial sans-serif 11px.
I prefer Arial in Firefox. It is more readable. Safari smooth engine makes the letter weight increase and decrease the letter spacing. Firefox win.
Font family : Georgia serif 18px.
Safari text rendering is smooth compare to firefox (too sharp and looks like crap.) Safari win
Conclusion
If Steve Job never learn about typography. Mac never get multiple type faces*. That what he said in his Commencement address at Stanford in 2005. That’s one of the best speech i ever heard.
*PS : at 4.38 “Windows just copy the mac” < Owned
actually a lot of people hate the text rendering in Safari.
but IMO, it does look good sometimes, not all the time.
there’s a tip to fix the safari rendering “problem” though.
damn… i guess u not use the clear type smooth edge effect on ur windows.. bcoz… my ff3 doesnt look bad like that.. thats screenie looks like on ie 4/5 years ago.. huhuhu..
but still.. safari have a good text rendering.. but somtime i dont like it.. huhu.. blurry..
I love the font rendering in Safari. Sometimes I prefer to use Safari(windows version) than FireFox because of the advance CSS rendering in Safari(Safari use WebKit Engine).
Pay a visit to http://jeffcroft.com in both browsers, you will get it. =)
I’m a firefox fan and I love it’s features, safari and the iphone lack browser settings, but I have to say that I think things do look better in safari. I don’t use safari except for testing and so may not know when it looks worse.
As for cleartype, from the documentation, it should? only be neccessary as a fix for flat screens, it shouldn’t be needed for crts and therefore SHOULD? only effect the display and not the capture.
If you think it looks better on a crt with cleartype then smoothing has improved the font which lacks resolution but then the font may have lost definition, however smoothing can help keep the filesize of fonts down. I had to treble the size of one of my intricate images to cater for internet explorer and it still looked worse than safari did originally.
I guess theres a balance that all browsers should adhere to, but then maybe we need to wait for screen technology to level out first (in the end crts matched their colors to each other and to printers). I feel more smoothing could be a good thing as so many web images have to be small and smoothing beforehand requires more bandwidth(scarce) rather than cpu(abundant).
In fact you have to be careful testing fonts on flat screens as anyone who has watched the credits of a DVD on a HD tv would see, whereas a far higher resolution crt can display consistently at any resolution it supports (except lower resolution than the source imagery).
This is because a flat screen is digital and therefore lacks the levels of brightness (on or off only) per pixel of an analog crt, meaning only native resolutions (resolution the flat screen was designed for) look half decent, especially for text.
Comparisons should therefore be made on crts and also tested on flat screens, otherwise you would have to know the hardware.
If wish the flat crt had made it out of development, but then would it have limitations anyway?