Karsten,
if the font smoothing hurts your head - turn it off or reduce it using System prefs - under Appearance. Also 600 dpi laser printers do use a form of antialiasing by varying the dot size on the edges.
Per haps flickering is hurting your head rather than the fonts ?
Well said Eric.
I’m a developer and I totally appreciate what designers bring to the table. I see the differences in the font rendering but am conflicted about my preference - I like each better than the other and at times I dislike each more than the other. I’d much rather leave font/colour/etc selection to you guys than to stab in the dark myself. I think you’re spot on about the different priorities - although I have never willingly selected Times Roman. 
update: “it’s a question of whether you respect the pixel grid”…
The other option is to respect the font designers intentions.
Most fonts contain specific hinting for these pixel sizes, that cannot be used when you distort the letter shapes for the sake of flipping pixels. You lose the ability to read word forms also know as “word shapes” at a glance significantly reducing reading speed and increasing reading fatigue.
Hopefully no one here is still reading individual letters…that is kindergarten level reading. Once you get past that you read word forms. Font designers know all about this, average computer users may be confused my single letter legibility, vs real readability.
Even MS knows this, despite optimizing their technology for the opposite to “better accommodate” low resolution displays.
ttp://www.microsoft.com/typography/ctfonts/WordRecognition.aspx
I use both vista and tiger daily.
This is totally subjective dependent on the font chosen and on screen resolution. It only even looks this close on blocky san-serif “western” fonts.
Once you get off cheap crappy low resolution/dpi monitors, the true letter forms look soooo much better then the distorted pixely garbage windows pushes out. Pick any font other then arial/verdana/tahoma and you will be blown away at the difference.
At these low crappy resolutions, check out any font with serifs or other accents and tell me which looks better. wow. They look so much better when rendered correct to their intended hintings and forms like apple does. Check out small times new roman samples etc. Only with boxy arial like fonts does the boxy distorted rendering looks like it is crisper…yeah ms!
Not to mention the western centric view here, Asian and Arabic fonts are almost unusable in the windows pixel distortion method, really ugly, but very clear and sharp when rendered true to letter form. Completely usable and beautiful.
I find it humorious that this discussion is even occurring at this juncture in technology. Almost akin to which fonts look better on a dot matrix printer…really you’d rather not see dots at all…but if you are still on a crappy printer you talk about things like this in this way.
I have two windows Machines with Safari installed. They are both running at 96dpi 1280*1024. One of the monitors when running in “Medium” font smoothing is very blurry, where as on the other monitor “Medium” is quite readable. They are both identical systems otherwise. I have perfect vision so glasses etc is not an issue.
From this I have concluded that the appearance of the fonts (unsurprising) is heavily effected by the quality of the monitor. In general Macs are supplied with higher quality monitors than PCs which I believe is one of the main reasons the fonts look better.
When comparing my Mac-mini with my Vista machine on the same monitor I prefer the Vista font appearance (everything else though is visually better on the Mac), as the Mac-mini font is in my eyes more blurry and slightly harder to focus on. If you have a decent monitor though the difference to me is unimportant. On a cheaper monitor I would be surprised if most people did not prefer MS font rendering as smaller fonts on cheaper monitors become significantly harder to read/concentrate on.
I guess the link didn’t make my comment: http://www.topblogposts.info/2007/06/13/safari-for-windows/
I hate Mac font rendering. We have two macs in the office, an iBook G4 and a Mac mini both of which I am not comfortable using. The Mac mini especially is horrendous as far rendering fonts is concerned. Windows font rendering is much easier on the eye, although I am not fond of Cleartype. I keep that disabled. I prefer sharp fonts as I am 43 and wear glasses.
Sudeep
I just had to comment on this even though it’s OT:
“I tried using a Mac for almost a month, and I really gave it a fair shot. I transfered my whole computing life over to it for a bit. It turned out there were a bunch of things I didn’t like, and the anti-aliasing of small fonts was one of the worst. I actually set it to disable anti-aliasing for fonts lower than 12 points, but then Firefox always got the kerning wrong, and it still looked terrible. Add to that the fact that you can’t just maximize a window (zoom doesn’t always work), along with other things, and I just had to switch back. Sorry Apple.”
Sigh. This is a textbook example of how Microsoft’s programmers got the original Mac GUI wrong when they copied it for Win 3.1, and never bothered to fix it: there’s no zoom button on Mac OS windows because it’s unnecessary. What you’re mistaking for a “maximize” button is actually a “snap window to size of contents” button. Far more useful and elegant. Once again, Microsoft has no taste and no clue when it comes to the GUI. All that money and Gates has never been able to hire a decent human factors person.
I prefer Apple’s font rendering. Looking at a Windows’ screen really hurts my eyes.
And I totally agree with Alex. I feel sorry for the folks who are so used to the wrong things Microsoft does.
What’s the point of having a window spreads all over your screen when the content fills only 1/2 or 2/3 of it?
I’m using a Mac right now (and almost always do BTW) and even I prefer Microsoft’s cleartype.
Just loaded Safari for Windows. Good Lord! Why do the unvisited links have to be SO FAT??? Looks like crayons wrote the links. So far so good on the testing although one page I went to insisted I needed Windows Media 9 loaded but I have WM11 and it also can’t see that I have Java 6.1 loaded.
Do the people who like ClearType/Apple type see the illusion here:
http://www.jneurosci.org/content/vol25/issue23/images/large/zns0250504600001.jpeg (http://www.jneurosci.org/cgi/content/full/25/23/5651 for background)
It’s not just that ClearType/Apple type is blurry - the main problem is that it seems to exhibit that illusion on a subtly tiny scale. I suspect there may be a correlation then, in that the people who like ClearType/Apple type don’t see that illusion as strongly.
I’ve owned more Macs than most people here (11). My history with Apple goes all the way back to the Apple II and continued with every generation of the Macintosh. However, this does not blind me to reality, which is very simple:
Whatever other virtue the Mac has, OS X font rendering, quite simply, sucks.
People who disagree are usually die-hard nerds who possess little or no aesthetic sense, completely unaware of their lack of sound judgment and tendency to self-delude. Truly pathetic creatures who cannot handle the truth.
I was playing around with Safari on my work PC, then played around with the ClearType tool for XP, and finally found a nice compromise. The LCD looks good, not great. Safari for XP looks terrible, way too dark and blurry.
Then I get home and on my MacBook, the above Safari picture looks great and the XP picture looks too thin.
Must be the resolution or something because I prefer the Mac font smoothing on the Mac and the XP smoothing on the PC.
You guys actually prefer to see the pixels? And you prefer to have unkerned fonts? This is a joke, right? April 1st came early this year.
And green-on-black monitors are the “most readable” too, right?
Ha, you guys crack me up.
Isaiah
Does “prefer to see the pixels” imply that you can’t see the red and blue outlines on the left and right sides of so-called ClearType and Mac type?
Perhaps those who like ClearType and Mac type are just slightly color-blind?
It is true. I use the nice new Dell 2407W-HC to type this from a connected MacBook Pro, and no matter how I try to set up fonts, they are MUCH worse then what Windows XP renders for me. MUCH worse.
I have 20/10 vision - so whoever wrote about people without glasses preferring Apple - boloney.
Common fonts to all versions of Windows Mac equivalents
http://www.ampsoft.net/webdesign-l/WindowsMacFonts.html
I’ve tried both cleartype and Mac fonts and I have to say I hate both. They BOTH look blurry to me and after a minute or two and I start to get eye-strain as my eyes desperately try to re-focus. My optician said that I can read the letters on the chart much smaller that is usually possible for the average person, so maybe my dislike of sub-pixel/anti-aliased fonts stems from the fact that I CAN see that fringes/aliased pixels quite clearly. I really really hope that future OS’s don’t force smoothed fonts on to every user.
Having recently bought a MacBook Pro, after years of using Windows, I, like so many others, am finding the font rendering on the Mac extremely hard to read and tiring on my eyes.
I tend to sit close to my monitor. On the MacBook’s screen the fonts are ok - small point sizes are still unforgivably blurry. On my external LCD, all fonts look pretty awful. I’ve learnt to sit further back, and hopefully, like others have said, in a few months I’ll be accustomed to the Apple font rendering.
I really think Cleartype is superior and would use it if the technology was available on my Mac. People have said, “Apple font rendering is closer to the printed forms.” Print is print. Screen is screen.
I really appreciate Microsoft’s efforts towards screen readability and creating custom typefaces fit for that purpose. That IS how I use the operating system after all. If only Apple would do the same, I’d be well chuffed.