IE 7 Beta 2: Fonts
I’m not happy with the fonts in IE7b2. Let me give you an example, from this very page:
As you can see, IE doesn’t properly antialias its fonts like Firefox does, making them look somewhat chunky. Even though they now let you scale fonts to an arbitrary size, what’s the point if they don’t look good? Here’s a closeup that might help you notice the difference:
I can’t figure out why they are doing such weird antialiasing, but it doesn’t look sharp or professional.
| This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 31st, 2006 at 6:04 pm and is tagged with arbitrary size, antialiasing, ie 7 beta 2, fonts, firefox, beta. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback. |
Thanks Jim It now looks like normal it was driving me nuts,
It’s cleartype. You can disable it in the advanced section, under multimedia, in the options menu.
[...] Design Detector has an awesome article which details the problems faced by IE7. I’ve pointed out font problems that I encountered myself, but the real sticker is that IE7 doesn’t feel sleek, new, or awesome. It’s better than IE6, but it still lags way behind firefox in terms of general usefullness. Why are people going to use Microsoft’s browser when it doesn’t perform better than Firefox? [...]
The font in IE7 looks 1000% better than it did before.
I’m shocked with how good it looks. ” IE doesn’t properly antialias its fonts like Firefox does”
Who cares???!!!! If it looks better, obviously it was done INCORRECTLY for a REASON.
IE7 looks better than FF hands down.
mufasa >> Ever heard of religious fundamentalism? Ever heard about lemmings? Ever heard about security? Ever heard about DOM? ;o)
According to Symantec FF was in front of IE most of 2005, when it comes to security-holes … talking about ‘track record’
FF’s DOM-handling is nothing less than a disaster! It’s DOM-layer is completely destroyed, compared to Netscape 6 and older Mozillas, as no DOM-handlings get evaluated … none whatsoever!
You’re able to append rederable elements to meta-, style- and script-elements – and you can append any element to image-, input-, options-, or any other elements.
You can even clone the whole documentElement and append it to an option-element … _and_ get it rendered in the option …!!!
Nothing at all gets validated in the process – leaving the resulting code extremely invalid. No other browser on the market is that sloppy – indead not the older Gecko’s.
“Sure IE7 is going to be standards compliant for few weeks but as their track record has clearly demonstrated to us they will eventualy get further and further behind”
- wake up! No browser is perfect. Although their disasters fall in different categories and areas, one browser is not significantly worse than it’s compettitors overall.
One thing’s for sure, though: The fundamentalists shouting the loudest, usually know the least ;o)
Thanks to the person above. I don’t like cleartype, it just looks weird to me and it was started to be used in other apps for some reason after I installed I.E.7. The funniest thing I think is that this webpage doesn’t even render properly in I.E.! Pathetic. Back to Firefox.
Hi there,
Not sure if it’s been mentioned already, but you can turn ClearType off by going to Tools, Internet Options, Advanced, then under the Multimedia subheading is an option for “Use ClearType”.
Elliott,
First, thanks for the blog and the post on IE7 fonts. I am trying to figure how to tweak things to make them look a little sharper, and appreciate your information here.
Second, I applaud you for not jumping on the popular bandwagon to bash all things Microsoft. I love the communist comments “If it is profitable it must be bad.”
~Rick
Mr. Back, you should see if you can get your post preview code to filter tags before displaying.
http://aphyr.com/media/screenshots/firefox_linux_smoothing.png
Note also that Firefox’s font rendering is system-dependant. On my box running X.org 6.8 with an LCD display, I also get RGBv sub-pixel smoothing. Depending on the X server and GTK settings, it will use other methods to render fonts.
Firefox font smoothing.
That looks like sub-pixel smoothing to me. It’s probably something to do with cleartype, but I don’t claim to understand the windows font rendering system.
I differ on IE7 being visually cleaner… the layout feels gunked-up, to me, compared to FF, Galeon, Konqueror, or Safari. It’s not as much of an issue on larger displays, but I prefer each toolbar to have a distinct purpose. IE crams things together in interesting ways, and the positioning of tabs vs the rest of the interface is an odd choice. It feels like they didn’t know whether to go for a full MDI (Opera makes a big deal out of this) or opt for a simpler visual metaphor like Safari or Firefox.
All in all, I’m happy for IE users. They can finally catch up with the rest of us.
The big advantage that Firefox has over other browsers is the extensions.
However, for normal, everyday browing, trhat doesn’t apply.
IE7 is much faster at rendering than Firefox for sure, it’s comparable with opera.
The implementation of tabs in IE is better than in Opera/Firefox. Even without the tab paging it’s better.
Visually IE is cleaner.
Cleartype makes pages easier to read.
> At the moment, In my opinion IE7 is the better browser and Firefox are going to have to catch up.
Amazing statement for a hardly-customizable version of IE7! So what’s there for FF to catch up on??? If it’s new UI, forget it, IE really did that in (sure, we’ll all maybe get used to it, but they better make it *completely* changeable – for that matter, FF should make their toolbar moveable!).
Sawoot!!!
I don’t see how your rant on Microsoft has any relevance to the discussion at hand which is regarding the browser market.
You either have a very short memory or don’t remember the early days of the web when it was Netscape (now Mozilla) that was causing incompatibilities with browsers by producing their own bespoke extensions with poor documentation on how exactly they were supposed to be rendered by browser developers.
“Imagine if Microsoft came up with tcpip, the internet protocol”
You seem to think that TCP/IP is the first widespread networking protocol. BBS systems with proprietary systems had been going for a long time before the popularity of the web. The likes of AOL and Compuserve became very popular and profitable on these types of systems. However they never achieved complete control on public wide area networks because of that.
Once HTTP was created, an alternative open feature-rich standard was available that was both cheaper to implement and more connectable (to other providers). Soon after, Internet providers eclipsed the old style BBS providers and eventually the likes of AOL and Compuserve switched to HTTP over TCP/IP too
If Microsoft had implemented a proprietary networking system, they would have met the same fate. In fact they tried to (a very limited) extent with The Microsoft Network.
Unless Microsofts implementation was considerably superior they couldn’t pull it off. In the same way Netscape failed because they fell behind and Netscape 4 was an awful browser (which wasn’t updated for years).
At the moment, In my opinion IE7 is the better browser and Firefox are going to have to catch up. I can’t wait for the IE beater that I’m sure Firefox will release. If you watch closely, you’ll notice them copy some of IE’s features in the coming months.
Yay!!!! that’s right, jump dammit!!!!! Jump!!!!!
Come on admit it. Their track record has been buy, copy, cheat, steal, get behind, buy, copy, cheat, get back on target, loose it all again, buy, copy cheat, hustle, copy.
Microsoft have had hardly any good ideas of their own. Just about all of their products have been copied, or bought.
Imagine if Microsoft came up with tcpip, the internet protocol we love that makes all this free speech possible. We’d be paying M$ licensing fees just to freaking surf the web, and this would be on top of our ISP fees. Thank god for open source and people who actually want to further what we can and cannot do in this space as opposed to just profit and dictate.
Microsoft have had nothing to do with internet innovation, tcpip was invented in a university and Netscape came up with the first browser. Just like Macromedia came up with Flash M$ are copying and will probably release sparkle on Vista. Its success will have nothing to do with whether or not it is “good” but because M$ will be forcing it down our throats.
Once again Microsoft copied, stole, and cheated, and will no doubt make it hard for people to compete. Typical.
Not that I really care. I actually like some aspects of Microsoft, particularly their marketing and their xbox. But I’m not going to pretend they are any good in this here internet space. I am and always will be an xbox fan, and i think its one of the only things they have done that really really rocks.
I don’t I agree with you. I think Microsoft will loose track of future web standards and security again, I truly dont think they cant keep up with the script kiddies that love to compromise their software and I think that firefox will keep up firefox and the open community will. Because for them its not about the money its about a better online experience. Nothing at all to do with *cough, big words* market share.
>their track record has clearly demonstrated to us they will
>eventualy get further and further behind
What tarck record? They produced a Duff browser? So did Mozilla/Netscape with Netscape 4! In fact the reason IE gained the market share that they did was because Netscape 4 was so bad that even the Mozilla “Fanboys” (to use your term) turned their back on it.
It was Mozilla/Netscape that started the whole releasing non-standard extensions thing in the first place.
With no competition, Microsoft stopped actively developing their browser. That was a bad thing. Now the competition’s back.
I don’t see the reasoning by your suggestion that IE8 will be a long time in development. The only reason taht would be the case is if Mozilla lost a huge chunk of its market share. That point seems to contradict the rest of your post.
Regardless of how the fonts look in IE7 (and they do look good on my laptop – in fact as good as what the fonts look like on my mac, and that’s saying something) I will still use firefox. Sure IE7 is going to be standards compliant for few weeks but as their track record has clearly demonstrated to us they will eventualy get further and further behind and we’ll have to wait for IE8 (sigh even more years) for the next update. All the IE fan boys will jump up and say yay! But us more refined surfers will stay happy with firefox.
Jonsey: you shouldn’t have to read the manual to make something as “default” as font appearance look right.
And besides firefox will get those nice font eventually.
If you take the time to read about ClearType and run the ClearType tuner I am sure you will be able to make things look fantastic. ClearType will always give better results than traditional anti-aliasing
ClearType tuner details:
http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=58643
IE7 rocks.
At a guess, I’d say you’re using a TFT screen.
I dual screen all my machines with a CRT and a TFT on each. On the machine I installed IE, the CRT is my main monitor. I was stunned by the anti-aliased fonts. They look absolutely gorgeous. It’s actually the reason I switched from Firefox. I can’t stand Firefox’s ugly ragged fonts now I’ve seen better.
Then I dragged the IE window on to my TFT whilst I was getting on with work. Suddenly I see exactly what you mean, they look awful on a TFT panel!
That’s ok, the good triumph over evil in the long haul. Long live IE!!!
Wait until you see the anti-aliasing in Vista–Cleartype will do sub-pixel optimization on the edges of fonts.
Looks like Cleartype style rendering for LCD screens. Do you have any of those options turned on? Maybe it uses that font render path anyway.
Cleartype seems great for small fonts, but isn’t as good as normal anti-aliasing on larger fonts.
Thanks for that – haven’t got around to installing the beta version yet and I was wondering about this exact issue. Does it change at all when you have smooth fonts turned on in Windows?
Yeah I noticed that the overall appearance of IE7 Beta 2 seemed pretty unpolished. I know that it’s a beta but I was a bit surprised. So far I haven’t seen anything in it that will make me switch back from FireFox, but I guess we’ll have to wait and see what the actual release is like.
Well it doesn’t look professional because the company that makes IE isn’t exactly professional… nuff said.