IE9’s Stunning Text Rendering Quality

re: IE9’s Stunning Text Rendering Quality

sandy90 — Tue, 21 Dec 2010 06:00:22 GMT

The quality of text rendering is good but performance of rendering is really bad. It's about 50% slower than Firefox and Chrome. Chrome 8 has a good quality / performance mix. I need to call fillText() 1000+ times with small amounts of text and I am seeing a big performance hit in IE9. Please, please, please improve performance of fillText() and other drawing functions. Thanks in advance! And thanks for making a great product.

re: IE9’s Stunning Text Rendering Quality

Josiah Sprague — Fri, 24 Sep 2010 12:23:03 GMT

My experience with IE9's text rendering has been completely different. I am on Windows 7 with ClearType enabled, and the browser seems to render text with very pixelated edges, sometimes even off-colored pixels around the text. I am excited that it seems to support font-weight fully, but that wont really matter if fonts render as poorly as the text on my website.

re: IE9’s Stunning Text Rendering Quality

Asad — Wed, 08 Sep 2010 21:02:40 GMT

good news, no need to use javascript libraries to rerender fonts for atleast one browser

re: IE9’s Stunning Text Rendering Quality

iMadalin — Fri, 27 Aug 2010 01:27:24 GMT

@Patrick you are right. The patched freetype2 in Ubuntu makes fonts look best in chrome/firefox/opera if using Ubuntu default desktop. You may experience some differences with Kubuntu default setup but can be easy fixed.

try this to see some diferences in different operating systems: go to typekit.com/.../full, pick a font you would like to see results and select Browser Samples.

re: IE9’s Stunning Text Rendering Quality

Michael Swanson — Mon, 02 Aug 2010 15:21:23 GMT

@Paul: The screenshots are all at 100%, and--other than cropping--they've not been modified in any way. It's possible that your browser is automatically resizing them, and I've had a few poeple write me about this issue. If you're unsure, click each image for a full size version.

re: IE9’s Stunning Text Rendering Quality

Paul Irish — Mon, 02 Aug 2010 03:24:06 GMT

Your screenshots are all scaled to a non-native size and aspect ratio.

So... they all look quite a bit worse than they should.

re: IE9’s Stunning Text Rendering Quality

HUan — Fri, 30 Jul 2010 03:00:26 GMT

Maybe u should upload some snaps of OSX, which really means quality

re: IE9’s Stunning Text Rendering Quality

Josh — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 13:16:11 GMT

Cool stuff I guess, as a developer I'll be ecstatic just to have full HTML5/CSS3 support. I hate the idea that something as simple as rounded corners isn't supported by IE8. And while IE9 is supposed to be more standards compliant, I can't count on all (or even the majority) of end users upgrading any time soon. So while focusing on using hardware to improve the text rendering is cool, I wish the IE development team would focus more on standards compliance. I guess I'm just going to be stuck rounding my own corners for the next few years!

re: IE9’s Stunning Text Rendering Quality

Mark Chambers — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 11:26:43 GMT

I take it that's FFX, Chrome and Safari on Windows OS? I thought the text was rendered via Windows ClearType (OS font renderer) rather than being browser level font rendering. That's why Safari looked so crap (compared to Safari on Mac) when it was released for Windows.

Anyway, those results for IE9 look amazing.

re: IE9’s Stunning Text Rendering Quality

Michael Swanson — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 04:48:24 GMT

@tack: You're correct. In this case, though, the artwork uses a vector-based OpenType font called Myriad Pro from Adobe: store1.adobe.com/.../index.cfm. The results certainly vary from font to font, but the relative quality differences between browsers seem to remain the same.

@bf: Unfortunately, nobody seems to agree which versions should be tested. Believe me...I've received many conflicting recommendations via e-mail. At the end of the day, though, I encourage everyone to distrust my results and to form their own conclusions.