website stat

Visual comparison of major OS’s font rendering

Personally I don’t like ClearType at all. And looking at it gives me headaches. Also, Linux’s myth of bad font rendering is finally over.


7 Responses to “Visual comparison of major OS’s font rendering”

Feed for this Entry
  1. João Antunes
    Published at January 8th, 2007 at 1:09 am

    Did you used Firefox or Safari on the OS X screenshots?
    Safari handles text much better than Firefox:
    http://www.zeldman.com/2006/11/27/safari-beats-firefox/

  2. mlopes
    Published at January 8th, 2007 at 1:35 pm

    João,

    For Mac OS X I used Camino, a Mozilla browser using standard Mac OS X widgets but the Gecko render engine (same version of the one that comes with Firefox 1.5 if I’m not mistaken).

  3. Andre
    Published at January 8th, 2007 at 7:25 pm

    I would have used Safari for the testing… if not you can always use Camino 1.2, the latest trunk build, available at http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/camino/nightly/latest-trunk/
    It already uses the Cairo graphics library and is capable of far better results than the previous versions.
    But if your point was to provide a comparison of the best available solutions in each OS, you had to go with Safari dude…

  4. mlopes
    Published at January 8th, 2007 at 8:27 pm

    Andre,

    I didn’t use Safari so I could use the same rendering engine. I don’t believe it has affected the results. Font rendering looks amazing on Mac OS X. At least IMHO.

  5. Chuck
    Published at January 8th, 2007 at 11:19 pm

    To my old eyes the Ubuntu font rendering is very poor compared to the others. For instance the lower case a’s all look like smudgy in the loops, the w’s look thicker than the e’s, etc. I’m really surprised at how amateurish the Ubuntu fonts look, especially because I’ve never seen then look that bad in any other Linux screenshots I’ve seen. You might want to try again if you want to prove to Linux your point about equal quality Linux font rendering.

  6. spreiser
    Published at January 9th, 2007 at 1:24 am

    There is really nothing wrong with the ‘cleartype’ version… You all just forgot to use your 3D glasses!

  7. ed
    Published at March 5th, 2007 at 12:27 am

    gnu/linux fonts are getting better all the time. its not just about the fonts though, it’s about how much desktop real estate there is. on x we have virtual desktops, windows just doesn’t come close, there’s no sane virtual desktop that doesn’t make using the system painful.