Yeah, I know, this tends to be a Mac-centric blog, but today I’ve got a Windows XP tip for ya. 
After sending my dad a link to an interactive infographic about the internet’s lifetime up until now (which by the way is really cool, here’s the link to my post about it: http://evolutionofweb.appspot.com/ ), he mentioned that he couldn’t view the page in Internet Explorer 8. (This also means YOU can’t see that page in IE8 and earlier, I don’t know about IE9, as I didn’t test it. If you’re using any version Internet Explorer, do yourself a favor and check out Firefox, Google Chrome, or even Apple’s own Safari. I’m not bashing Microsoft, but they are notorious for not adhering to web standards, which means you can’t see the web as it is supposed to be seen, in many instances. It also has security holes that tend to go unfixed. It’s usually the first browser to get hacked at a yearly hacker conference where they test these sorts of things. Oh yeah, and webpages will probably load faster using a browser other than IE. I won’t go in-depth on why this is, as that is a well-researched rant for a different time…) Another caveat to that Evolution Of The Web link: It doesn’t seem to work very well with mobile browsers. I didn’t really expect that it would, but it was suggested that I update this post to warn people about it, just in case. Thanks for the heads-up, mystery reader!
So anyway, my dad was asking my opinion on other browsers, as he had noticed some things about IE that he didn’t like and was actually considering ditching IE to go with something else. By the way, the main thing he found that he didn’t like: IE doesn’t support color management. If you’re a photographer, this means you will not see photos as they are supposed to look. This can result in some fairly major color shifts. For my Firefox friends: Firefox does support color management. Good for you, FF user!!
As we were checking out the different browsers on his computer, we noticed that fonts weren’t looking right at all on webpages. The worst was with Firefox. You could see all the individual pixels that make up each letter and number. It was fugly!! I knew this wasn’t right and that there had to be a fix. There is a fix, and it will make your fonts look better system-wide, meaning no matter what you’re doing on your computer, your fonts will look much better. So, enough of this backstory, right? You want the lowdown on how to make all them pretty numbers and letters look beautiful on your fancy computer machine thingy. So here ya go….
- Right-click on an empty spot on your desktop, then choose Properties from the menu that just popped up.
- Now choose the Appearance tab at the top of the Properties window that you just opened.
- Now click on the Effects button near the bottom right of that window.
- You want to go to where it says “Use the following method to smooth edges of screen fonts”.
- Make sure that the checkbox has a checkmark in it, then click on the dropdown menu next to it (it probably says Standard in that box right now), and choose ClearType.
- Now click on OK on the bottom of the Effects window.
- Now click on Apply on the bottom of the Properties window. (If Apply is not an option, don’t freak out, just click on OK.)
- The Properties window will still be there after clicking Apply, so now, click on OK.
All done! Now all the fonts in your browsers will look nice and clean, and so will fonts in every other facet of your computer. Look at the icons you have on your dekstop….do the fonts under the icons look different? They should. If you want, go through the process I just explained and compare what your fonts look like with and without ClearType. Mucho improvement, right? Yup! Now I just helped you make your Windows experience just that much nicer! How nice of me!
If you’d like some more information about how fonts are rendered and how font smoothing works on different computer operating systems and in different web browsers, here’s a great article that gets pretty in-depth and will explain it all: http://szafranek.net/works/articles/font-smoothing-explained/
More information on why you shouldn’t use Internet Explorer:
http://leslieposton.hubpages.com/hub/SayNoToIE
http://www.worsttech.com/products/why-internet-explorer-sucks-1102887.html