
Please Stop "Fixing" Font Smoothing - bpierre
http://www.usabilitypost.com/2012/11/05/stop-fixing-font-smoothing
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DigitalSea
No offence to the author, but they obviously have never developed a website
with custom fonts and viewed it in Chrome before... I wrote about this issue
in 2010: [http://ilikekillnerds.com/2010/12/a-solution-to-stop-font-
fa...](http://ilikekillnerds.com/2010/12/a-solution-to-stop-font-face-fonts-
looking-bold-on-mac-browsers/) — Case in point. The company I work for who
designed the new Myspace and we did some early HTML prototyping of the site
designs and the sad reality is you need to use this font-smoothing fix or
Chrome butchers the fonts. Go and inspect the Myspace website and you'll see
this very fix is being used and you want to know why? Because it's required
and works. As are many other sites that use this fix.

It's definitely a Chrome issue, this isn't just some property designers are
playing with for the heck of it. Want to see another issue in another browser?
Put light text on a dark background and view it in Firefox. Fonts like
Helvetica Neue especially have the problem, but any chunky font will show
extra faux bold. There is no fix for this in Firefox at present.

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arunitc
These settings are actually used to fix Chrome's font-smoothing bug. This bug
has been open for over a year and fonts really look ugly.

[https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=137692](https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=137692)

