Of IE7, Firefox and fonts
October 25th, 2006 at 12:13am Os
When IE7 was launched, I dutifully installed it, since it had a few features that I was interested in and it was reportedly more secure than IE6. All in all, slightly underwhelming, but a big improvement on IE 6, but then that isn’t really hard.
For day-to-day surfing I use FireFox, so I dutifully downloaded Firefox 2.0 when it became visible on the Mozilla ftp site. So far I’m impressed: it feels faster; the majority of my extensions worked a treat; I like the improvements to the tabs and so far no crashes.
But, by far the biggest change to my system was brought about by IE7, and that is my switching to using Cleartype instead of the normal XP anti-aliasing for fonts. I had always assumed that Cleartype was only for LCD displays, which I don’t use on my desktop, but IE forces Cleartype for it’s font rendering and I liked how it rendered. So I switched over to Cleartype in Windows and, frankly, I think it looks a whole lot better.
So, thank you IE7 team; I may still need some convincing that your browser isn’t a monolithic security hole that I only use on sites that absolutely, positively refuse to work with Firefox, but you have indirectly made Windows look new and fresh for me, and I’m grateful for that.
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