I've a question for anyone like me who thinks they're seeing spots before their eyes...

If you load up a page on Chrome, do some of the fonts look pretty 'jagged'?

Firefox seems to have better less 'fuzzy' rendering of fonts than Chrome, and looking further at MSFT Internet Explorer, this seems to fall in between the other two in quality.

I've always thought that unlike graphics (where PNG is superior to JPG where you get more artifacts on scaling images) a text font is going to be 'pure' and not distorted.

Am I imagining things - or is there a subtle difference between how these browsers work when displaying text?

(and by all means take the piss - I probably deserve it for asking a question like this, but if there are any technical mavens out there I'd love to know if I'm going nuts or there is really something going on here, LOL)

Different browsers render fonts differently, it's because they use different engines to render the fonts onto your screen. Chrome's engine tends to render to fonts sharper, I'm not sure there's anything you can do about it.

cheers for that MT - I was just wondering if I was going mad staring at too many screens and seeing things, eheh

Don't forget as well, IE has that daft 'smartscreen filter' that's supposed to render things slightly differently for people using TFT monitors (99% of people!)

thanks for your feedback..

the best smoothest looking fonts (on my screen) seem to come on Firefox.

both Chrome and IE look awful with certain 'medium' fonts and I can't figure out why? (why they'd make themselves look crappy that is, when Firefox looks so much better?)

Being a website designer I'm constantly exposed to problems like this on a daily basis. What OS are you using? On Mac (my OS/Platform of choice) you will notice a far smoother render of typefaces in all browsers that you would on Windows. It sometime depends on the font, font size (some typefaces are optimised at an uneven value e.g. 11,13,15px) whether it is a system font, contrast of background and foreground colours (some browsers render colours differently) but you shouldn't notice too much of a difference across a range of browsers on one OS, unless of course you are using IE which is so, so shit.

Bluedacris, your thoughts would be greatly appreciated:-

I'm a Firefox convert for many years (using Mozilla's Thunderbird client too) but recently I've taken on Chrome to avoid some of the Firefox incompatibility plug-ins when using UK proxy servers and the like, and also have IE since it comes with Windows XP.

I'm not a MAC man since I was in corporate Honda with responsibility for a little publishing (and dealing with dealers) and that was over ten years ago...

the stuff I'm looking at now looks really awful on certain pages with Chrome and IE, but appears fine on Firefox. I've tried jiggling with font sizes and Chrome 'engine' settings, but just can't figure this out.

as earlier posters have said, it would appear that it's in the rendering and is simply an anomaly - unless of course you know otherwise?

any ideas you have would be greatly appreciated, and by all means feel free to PM me (I always return favours)

cheers

& thanks for your post.