When Apple released Safari for Windows, it wanted Windows users to experience their “superior” font rendering technology. Joel Spolsky disagrees with Apple and prefers Microsoft’s font rendering algorithm. And I respectfully disagree with Joel.
First, a bit of personal background. As someone who purchased the original Mac 128K back in February 1984, it’s easy to label me as an Apple “fanboy”. After all, only Steve Jobs and a tiny handful of Apple employees have owned Macs for longer than I did. Up until 1995, the Mac was my main computer whereas Windows remained the development one. Roles reversed when Windows 95 was introduced: Microsoft was doing a great job whereas Apple was slipping.
But there was one thing that I never liked about Windows: its font rendering. It always seemed to me that text looked out of focus. Things didn’t improve with Windows XP. In fact, one of the main reasons that I switched from Internet Explorer to Firefox 1.0 a few years back was this bug in IE: every once in a while (sometimes every day, sometimes every couple of weeks), IE would cause XP to revert to smoothing fonts. I was never able to find out what precisely caused this to happen, but it did and I couldn’t stand XP’s method of smoothing.
In 2005, it became increasingly clear to me that Apple was back in the saddle and racing ahead. I switched back to using Macs as a primary machine. One can argue all day long about the merits of one sub-pixel rendering algorithm versus the other, but to me, the Mac’s is clearly (no pun intended) superior to Windows’. I find Apple’s Preview program just amazing in its clarity of rendering font and lines.
