I’m with Dan. Safari’s font rendering looks better on my display too (a 30" Apple Cinema). Aside from the obvious and unaccountable subjective factor, I think display dot pitch may be the biggest determinant of which looks better to you. High density displays look better with more aggressive smoothing. The only final answer is resolution independence, which is supposedly coming in Leopard.
Under Edit Preferences Appearance in Safari, there’s a setting which you can use to lighten up the rendering a bit. I still prefer ClearType, but it’s not as jarring.
Sergio,
I really am not a Mac zealot, and I was not suggesting that the Mac’s approach was inherently better.
In general, I prefer the Windows font rendering, since I have good eyesight and can usually make out individual pixels. The Mac style (FreeType on Linux works similarly in most configurations) is great at first since the fonts look like they do on paper but it kind of wears on me after a while due to blurriness issues.
If the DPI is high enough so that you can’t make out individual pixels - or, in other words, if your eyesight is bad enough relative to the resolution of your display - then you will not get very much benefit from aggressive hinting and the Mac method will probably look better nearly all the time, and the fonts will look “truer.”
On another sub-topic - Some people have mentioned that Macs generally have a higher DPI setting - hasn’t the Mac always religiously used 72 DPI, or was this just back in the early days and they’ve moved to a higher DPI setting with OS X? Windows XP defaults to 96 DPI.
Don’t worry Geoff, soon Windows will have font rendering that is just as bad as Applies, thanks to WPF:
http://paulstovell.net/blog/index.php/wpf-why-is-my-text-so-blurry/
Paul
Having used Safari as my primary browser for a while, the top screenshot looks “right” to me, and while I think there’s an aesthetic case to be made for that point of view, it’s obvious that if you’re used to ClearType, suddenly your Google results will look very “wrong” in Safari. It is quite subjective, and like Dan I never realized that it was so. Very interesting post.
Re: Keith Schwerin
“Who cares if a font is ‘correct’ design wise if it looks like crap and hurts your eyes to read? READABILITY thats ALL that matters in fonts.”
I think the implication of those writing that the Mac OS X fonts are closer to “correct” is that correctly rendered fonts tend to be more readable and, if the page is thoughtfully designed, more aesthetically pleasing.
We should also be careful about making universal judgments in readability. Typographic experts have been studying readibility for a long time and still there is no consensus. I don’t think you can make a sweeping statement based on one look that the Mac’s rendering is less readable than ClearType, or vice versa.
Along those lines, I’m surprised by the remarks that say the rendering breaks down at the small point sizes. I find the “Advanced Search” and “Preferences” text in the screenshots marginally more readable than the (relatively) squashed text in the IE screenshot, but I think they’re both fine. Viewing this site on Mac Safari, I also have no trouble reading the small copyright notice at the bottom right of the page. It looks quite good to me.
I’m also surprised to learn that this issue is new to so many people. Anybody who has designed websites for both platforms in the last three years or so ought to have viewed their pages in Safari as well as Windows IE. (Not to mention Firefox, etc.) I’ve always found that Windows IE reliably renders fonts larger, thinner, and with less accuracy. “Less accuracy” doesn’t necessarily equal “bad,” but it is the truth as far as the font’s original design. In addition, as others have mentioned tangentially, a website printed out from Safari will look almost exactly like what you saw on the screen. The browser seems to aspire to WYSIWYG in that respect.
I completely disagree with this comparison, and I think the top anti-aliasing is far superior to Windows’ shitty ClearType. ClearType text always looks like it was printed with a clogged nozzle (excuse the print analogy) and is far too light when staring at tiny pixels on a screen. Plus, welcome to how the typeface is supposed to look - if you view the vector version of these typeface characters you’ll see Safari’s version is spot-on whereas ClearType takes “liberties” with the actual vector version. I prefer the original, thankyouverymuch.
As a Mac user, I would be quite angry if Microsoft developed a Macintosh application using ClearType to display text, as I am quite happily accustomed to the Mac’s font rendering and anti-aliasing (and find the IE text to be a bit rough and less welcoming to read). Clearly, Apple does not have this respect in developing for Windows. It’s less an issue of which is better, and more an issue of consistency and what you’re used to.
Here’s an interesting point that a US-centric audience will miss.
Japanese and Chinese in IE are hideous. Windows doesn’t anti-alias those scripts for some reason, so they’re jagged and nearly impossible to read.
Safari 3, with its terrific font smoothing (particularly for Asian languages), just might make those languages usable in Windows for the first time ever.
I used to use a Mac for a few days and I liked the way of font smoothing there (fwiw, cleartype is far from perfect), however on windows it just looks waaaay out of the place. As does the UI.
Well, IE didn’t have decent fonts as of Beta 2 of their IE7: http://elliottback.com/wp/archives/2006/01/31/ie-7-beta-2-fonts/
I think the current version is ok. Firefox has always been the king here.
“Joel Spolsky himself”?
You want to aspire to a guy whose FogBugz product is so inanely designed it doesn’t even have bottom margin padding on the main entry form? And you want to trust him for UI insight?
Come on, you can do better.
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. I gave it my best shot. Love the hardware though (Mac Pro). Running Vista x64 on it as we speak.
I totally agrees with Noah. Apple seems to ignore all design elements of Windows thinking, they can improve it. Fact is, they can’t. OS X looks nice (although I like Vista more), but the individual UI elements doesn’t work integrated into a Vista environment. In addition hereto, applications should look the same on each platform. This is the only way, the user are able to change all interfaces at a time by configuration the OS. That applies to anti-aliasing too. It will probably never happend, but for the best result, iTunes, QuickTime and Safari should - on Windows - apply to Windows design elements and guidelines. The features - if good enough - will still sell the software, but the design has to be consistent with the platform.
I don’t understand why one rendering is called “wrong” and other “right”. Indeed, there’s no best way to render. That is only a matter of your habits.
As for me, Safari text is more readable. By the way, text is more readable on all Mac OS X screenshots I’ve seen than on any Windows ones. Font is usually larger/heavier there and it is more friendly to eyes, especially with 20" LCD I’m using now.
Safari is unapologetically a Mac app and does almost nothing the “Windows way”, with the possible exception of maximizing behavior.
I think this is absolutely by design. You have to understand that Safari isn’t so much a pretender to the IE/Firefox throne as it is a Mac Emulator. It’s intended to facilitate development of Safari compatible web apps (and technically iPhone apps) by making them dead simple to test. You no longer even have to beg, borrow, or steal a Mac to see if your web app behaves under Safari. Just download and go.
So from that perspective-- and I can’t think of any others that make any business sense-- the closer Safari’s behavior is to the Mac version, the better.
It doesn’t really matter which is “better”, what’s odd is that Safari on Windows is so different from every other Windows app on my desktop that it sticks out as the one that appears to have “broken” fonts.
On the plus side, it might mean that people actually test their websites with Safari now!
Regards,
Rob…
Jeff, I still think it is a terrible try.
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Look at selections. Do you really select all layout blocks and so on in Mac applications? I want to select text easy, simple and highlight only the selection - not spacers and so on.
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All design elements is different. Look at the “icon” of a dropdown box in Safari. It equals the Windows one for a numeric selector. How can this difference be any good? Why bother implementing their own design for the scrollbar, when Windows offers these elements?
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I want Safari to comply to my - the users - rules and settings; not their. It is so 90’ies to create such lock-ins and to decide for the user while also eliminating a free choice.
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Font blending, as your post. Make it a choice. Use the operating system features by default; I can’t imagine, that it would be less optimized by using those things heavily supported by the OS.
On the Steve Jobs keynode, one of the highlights for next OS X is “consistent window design”. Guess they could apply that to their Windows offers.
If Mac was integrated in Windows, I would use it. They would still be able to show off with some nice effects and custom layout elements, where it would apply. Now I may have to use it for development, but then again - I nearly won’t have to bother, if noone are going to use it. There has to be someone to test for (I know there is, but I hope my point is clear).
ClearType looks much more “computer-y” to me, while Apple’s subpixel rendering looks more like real type. I think part of the difference is that Microsoft tries to make everything fit the pixels. Most vertical lines are pretty much 1 pixel wide and smack dab in the middle of a pixel. I wonder whether they change the kerning slightly to get the letters to the right place…
I use both Macs and Windows, but I actually prefer Apple’s font rendering. It’s less harsh - of course, that’s a subjective view. Some people might call the Mac’s rendering “less crisp” 
By the way, on Macs, there’s a setting where you can make your subpixel rendering more or less crisp, and there’s also a setting for people with CRTs which seems to turn subpixel rendering off completely, using normal font interpolation.
Finally, if it’s true that Apple’s rendering is closer to the final output, then it obviously makes sense for Macs - which are often used in publishing - to use this rendering style. Otherwise, printers would be surprised if text suddenly looked much darker or much lighter when printed out, and did not match the greys used anymore
I think Apple’s font rendering looks a lot better. Windows looks very thin light. I prefer the darker, thicker appearance.
God. I loathe OSX’s font rendering. It’s one of the major contributing factors to my Mac ownership experiment ending and me going back to windows full time.
Aesthetically, The OSX rendering looks better, no doubt. But in clarity and readability, ClearType destroys it (on an LCD only). OSX feels like my eyes are melting, but ClearType is, as the name implies, crystal clear.
That said, I’m glad they used the OSX rendering in the PC safari. Now you can test almost exactly how your web pages will look on a Mac, without having to use one.