Judge me all you want, but when I used Windows, my browser of choice was Internet Explorer. You know why? Because text in Internet Explorer looked bloody beautiful. Unlike, you know, Chrome, where text was a blurry mess. Seriously, it was painful. Until today.
Chrome's latest update, version 37, finally adds support for DirectWrite on Windows for improved font rendering, according to the release notes. If you aren't a font nerd, you only need to know this: DirectWrite is a text layout rendering API that first arrived in Windows Vista, which was released in 2007. Chrome came along a year later, and by 2009, people were already asking why fonts in Chrome on Windows looked so awful.
According to The Next Web:
Until now, Chrome used the Graphics Device Interface (GDI), which dates back to the mid-80s and the lower-resolution monitors of the time, to render text. Google says the switch "required extensive re-architecting and streamlining of Chrome's font rendering engine."
Check out the difference in the image below. No biggie, it only took five years to fix. Thanks, Google. [The Next Web]