Why does Chromium need to manually set default contrast/gamma values instead of just reading Windows' default ClearType values? The article mentions they added support for reading ClearType Tuner values last year, so why aren't the Windows defaults available through the same API? Seems unnecessarily complex to maintain separate defaults.
Developer of this feature and author of the blog post here. Good questions and I can elaborate. As you mentioned, Chromium does read ClearType Tuner values and passes them on to Skia them if they're set (I implemented this behavior last year).
However, most users don't run the ClearType Tuner. This announcement is basically that we are now using values that match the default ClearType contrast and gamma. There's no extra complexity or separate defaults. This behavior shipped later because it has a much larger impact on the user base.
This wasn't happening automatically because Chromium doesn't user DirectWrite for text rasterization, so they were missing default Windows behaviors like the ClearType Tuner integration and Windows default values.
