One of the first things I noticed when upgrading to Internet Explorer 7 was how much better the text looked. Further investigation revealed that Microsoft used the ClearType rendering engine, which is included in Windows XP.
If you’d like to experience the same look within Firefox, here’s how to enable ClearType rendering system-wide on Windows XP:
- Open Control Panel
- Go to “Display”
- Click on the “Appearance” tab
- Click on the “Effects” button
- Check “Use the following method to smooth edges of screen fonts”
- Select “ClearType” from the list
Here’s what some text in Firefox looks like before and after the changes:
2 responses so far ↓
1 saberworks // Jan 5, 2007 at 5:19 pm
I can’t believe what I’m seeing. You went from crisp, clear fonts on the left to blurry fonts on the right. How is that an improvement? And if you had cleartype disabled to begin with, why would IE decide to use it regardless of your “system-wide” setting?
2 ade // Jan 5, 2007 at 5:28 pm
Hmm … maybe the screen shots aren’t really a great representation of the change. On the left you should be able to see that certain characters, like the Vs and Os have jagged edges while they’re smoothed out on the right. I guess that could give it somewhat of a blurred look, but it certainly doesn’t seem blurry on my screen.
I can’t really speak to why IE doesn’t honor the system-wide settings. Microsoft’s been known to do that kind of thing
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