Now days, I honestly feel like the only person left that does not like most ClearType renders of fonts. To me, ClearType looks hazy, out of focus, blurred, etc. It’s harder for me to read in almost all cases, it makes my eyes strain because at best, it looks blurry. Yet, ClearType seems to be making quite a dent in the font rendering world.
What I can’t understand is why a coder of any sort would choose ClearType. After looking at code all day/night long, your eyes are already strained in most cases to the point that you might even be experiencing headaches – and that’s without using ClearType. I couldn’t last even half the time using ClearType. As soon as it was introduced and defaulted on the IE7 browser, the very first thing I did was turn it off.
I just read an article about the most friendly coding fonts and it happened to include a comparison between ClearType and no ClearType. You can easily see the difference and to me, it shows that ClearType is basically just a blurred version of the font. How anyone prefers this is beyond me. I even mentioned ClearType in another post here where some bloggers are using ClearType specific fonts that absolutely look like shit unless you have ClearType enabled. I refuse to even bother trying to read those blogs as they are completely unreadable to users who do not choose to use ClearType.
Call me old school, call me reluctant to join the crowds, whatever – all I know is ClearType makes my eyes hurt and so far I refuse to use it for that reason and also the fact that not everyone enables ClearType on their own machines – so basically it’s like using an obscure browser and designing and programming for this obscure browser and not caring that the majority of your users do not use this obscure browser.
