[grantheaslip]

I think the others who replied to this are missing the point -- he's complaining about the number of sites with fonts that look blurry, jagged, or just plain hideous on many text rendering engines (especially, but by no means limited to, Windows).

One could argue this is Microsoft's fault, and there's probably some credence to that, but it's kind of beside the point. Far too many sites seem to have been designed on OS X and not tested anywhere else, and it's an obnoxious, lazy, and frankly elitist practice that needs to end.

Another related syndrome are sites designed on professional-grade monitors, with no thought given to how they're going to look on the other 95% of screens. This kind of shit is like engineering a car in California and just assuming it will work well in February in Montreal.

[nknight]

Not having pretty font rendering must be so hard on the poor Windows minority, suffering under the stifling oppression of the Mac OS majority... Oh wait...

Seriously, if you want pretty font rendering, complain to Microsoft. The problem isn't that the sites are designed on Mac OS, it's just that Windows' font rendering sucks. It's horrific. We can't fix that. What is it you want us to do, put all text in images? That's been the traditional response to your platform's horrific font rendering.

[function_seven]

Pragmatically-speaking, image rendering or choosing another font are the only way your site is going to look good on a Windows (or other, non-OSX) machine. You're correct in that the font-rendering used on Windows machines is geared toward different goals that that on Macs, but that fact doesn't make the web page look any better to the user using a PC.

And they're going to blame you for using a custom font, not Microsoft.

I don't understand the point of your sarcasm in the first line. The idea is that Mac users are overrepresented in the web-designer community vs. the user community. So in essence, there exist a significant number of websites that appear to have never been tested in non-OSX browsers, for it they were, it would be apparent to the designer that they look like shit in those environments.