Here is a screenshot of some text from the Google Play store rendered in IE, Firefox and Chrome. Click the image to see it in its full size:

http://imgur.com/yYKSNBB

Firefox looks the best to me; Chrome the worst. IE is not great either, but it is better at larger font sizes than Chrome (IMO).

You might argue that the difference in each browser is not great, but it is a noticeable difference.

I would have thought that text rendering would be top priority from a UX perspective given that reading text constitutes such a major part of browsing the web.

So I installed MacType, only to find that Chrome has two ways to render fonts, and both are extremely wonky, I spent like 30 minutes tweaking MacType to my tastes, and then 3 hours re-tweaking it to make Chrome behave properly, it was a serious pain.

there are two issues: 1) Windows 8 assumes CRTs won't ever be used with it, and takes the liberty to do some LCD specific graphics stuff, that doesn't even work in LCDs that are organized differently (example: if the panel is "sideways" somehow).

2) the default system font of Windows 8 onwards is "Segoe", that renders poorly in CRTs, and even worse if you disable anti-aliasing of any kind.

Sorry, I have to bite. Why?!?

CRT advantages over the LCDs I have here:

1) Greatly better contrast, in fact it is what made me switch back to CRT (all my LCDs have extremely poor contrast, in some of them is impossible to watch "Game of Thrones" for example because in dark scenes you see just everything gray, except for the teeth of the actors).

2) Greatly better colours (LCD not only has colour shifting as you move around, it has less colours overall too).

3) Greatly faster response time. (even to do normal stuff, like using normal programs, with LCDs I misclick a lot).

4) I can use whatever resolution I want... I can play old games in low resolution can play new games in high resolution, can play widescreen games letterboxed or stretched, can play GPU-intensive games in low resolution to make them faster without losing quality due to upscaling, etc...

5) It feels much easier on my eyes for some reason, I am not sure what.

- Non-16:9 aspect ratio. Photoshop is much nicer on 1600x1200 (relatively common CRT resolution) than on 1920x1080. CRTs are frequently 16:10 or even 4:3, so if I had a particularly nice one I'd be hesitant to replace it (4:3 LCD or LED are really hard to find).

- Higher refresh rate. 60Hz is nice enough, but 96Hz or higher is very pleasant. CRTs have a higher refresh rate than LCDs due to how they work (and if they didn't, you'd get quite a headache because there's no backlight).

High-end LCD screens have more or less caught up by now, but it took them a long time and they're still expensive (granted, high-end CRTs are at least as expensive now, but if you've had one for a while there's no real rush to replace it).

The problem, as demonstrated by your example and the replies it's generated, is that people have different preferences on text rendering.

Of your 3 samples I think IE is the best and Chrome's is the worst, with FF inbetween. More precisely, I'd be OK with reading text rendered the first way indefinitely (although I'd want to change it), the second one I could probably stand for a few minutes, and the last one I'd want to stop looking at as quickly as possible, because of how blurry it looks.

This is what I normally use:

http://imgur.com/T3ihEqw

Sharp, pure non-antialiased text. I can read text like that all day without feeling like my eyes are going out of focus.

Edit: For the folks who are apparently offended by my browser use, I’ll elaborate:

Why would anyone want a large number of tabs, you ask? Well, when researching a topic, it’s often useful to open in tabs, breadth-first style, every potentially relevant link in a network of {academic papers, historical web pages, wikipedia articles, ..}.

For me, it’s much more efficient to partition my browsing tasks into {open a bunch of tabs without looking closely at the content | go through the list of tabs in order, lightly skimming the content and closing any that aren’t relevant | dive deep into each relevant tab, reading carefully, taking notes, etc.}. I find that, as alternative strategies, both (a) trying to entirely finish with one tab before opening another, storing its hyperlinks in a text file for later examination, or (b) only opening links in the same tab, using the browser history as a linear linked list of my current place in the browsing tree, are much less effective.

Theoretically, my strategy could be done with a set of bookmarks, a list of links in a text file somewhere, one of those "read later" apps, etc. In practice, I find that it works better for me to just keep the tabs open in my browser. YMMV.

Anyway, now imagine you have 4–5 different long-term ongoing research interests/projects (possibly related). Sometimes, when diving into one topic, you end up stumbling across a useful tangent into one of the other topics you care about. Occasionally, the thing you stumble on is important enough to temporarily set aside the first topic (tabling the in-progress search by leaving all of the, say, 50 currently open tabs in their own window) and open up a new window to dive in on the second topic. Alternately, imagine you receive an important email, and need to suspend the entire research session for later. Again, it’s easier to just keep the window open with all the tabs in it, rather than closing everything and reconstructing it later.

This might not be the browsing style for everyone. But it works for me, and Safari is the only browser I’ve tried which holds up.

And only firefox has the infastructure to support such changes to its UI.

I would say that the only broweser that supports your use case is firefox, not safari.

This enables a workflow with several hundreds of tabs without the drawback of the additional RAM and CPU usage. Previously I shared the impression that Tree Style Tab for Firefox has ruined all other browsers for me and I could never switch away from Firefox but Tab Outliner showed me that I was wrong.

[1]http://tabsoutliner.com/

I typically have somewhere between 200 and 400 tabs open, and I work on a wimpy little 11" MacBook Air. The vast majority of those tabs are heavy things like Google Docs. Chrome seems to barely notice.

So why bother closing a tab when I can just switch out of the group when I'm doing something else? Another group does mail and google docs, another group does 'Atlassian stuff' (ticketing + wiki), another does build and CI, so on and so forth.

The only problem with this approach is memory consumption, because the modern web developer includes approximately 3/5ths of the entire internet on every page, and I 'only' have 8GB on my machine (non-expandable). Performance is fine for a while, but eventually (a couple of weeks) it starts to grind. Restarting FF at this point doesn't autoload the tabs, so it gives you a fresh slate, effectively.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tab-groups-pa...

I use Chrome's profile feature, to have separate Google accounts signed in.

And my tabs tend to be in "clusters". E.g. I'll have one cluster (5-10 tabs) where I'm doing research on IPv6, another where I'll have a cluster on some JS, another on say, Python list performance etc.

I remember where each cluster is, and even some of the tabs within each cluster - so I just page quickly to that cluster if I know I need to retrieve that info.

Also, I tend to not be that disciplined when bookmarking or filing stuff - so there's that as well.

I'm still yet to find a good lightweight note-taking system - Confluence as a wiki isn't bad, but is still quite heavyweight.

There are probably more efficient workflows, but this one works fairly well for me.

Much of the time they are effectively a queue of things to review/skim/familiarize myself with while I'm authoring some code or a design doc. The ones with different favicons tend to be things like bugs where I owe an update, so I scan through them regularly (I'm extremely forgetful when it comes to lists of things to do).

Honestly I know how tree-style management would go for me: I'd group a bunch of things together in a tree and forget about them, largely defeating the purpose of having kept the tab open for me.

EDIT: uBlock or similar is absolutely must though, unless you browse only slim, "old-school" websites.

Just because the way he/she uses software doesn't work well with chrome doesn't make chrome bad software, and it doesn't mean the user is wrong. It just means that it's not a good fit for that person.

Your explanation there is a great example of what I personally want to see more of. A clear concise reason why you prefer one browser to another.

So often its just "X is faster" or "Y uses less memory" without any other details. And those kinds of complaints help nobody.