Nice post title eh? Well it’s how I really feel considering I’ve been trying to fix an issue with the way Windows IE renders pages when using the Cleartype engine. Even if Cleartype is on system wide Firefox and Opera don’t bat an eye at it. IE6 and IE7 both render it like this:
Which is obviously not “clear” by any sense of the word. A current workaround involves specifying a background color or image for the element that is rendered horribly like that. That’s all fine and dandy except in situations where the background is using faux columns or is dynamic and uses theme switching. Regardless this is definitely an issue (yet again) of Internet Explorer NOT doing something correctly and it somehow always being up to us (the non billionaire company) the developers to fix or find a workaround.
That is the thing that pisses me off the most. 5 years without any fixes or updates by Microsoft since they beat Netscape. When do we see an update? As soon as they lose marketshare to Firefox suddenly it’s all systems go.
Tragically though while IE’s team has a budget the people who make a living developing sites for it don’t have a budget dedicated to taking the time to figure out how to get past the inconsistancies and bugs in Microsoft’s great idea du jour.
In the hopes that maybe (just maybe not too much hope here) that Microsoft or at least the IE development team might actually examine this problem and do something about it I sent an email to Chris Wilson, Group Program Manager of the Internet Explorer Platform team at Microsoft.
Here is the email I sent:
Hi there,
I was wondering if the IE development team could look at how with cleartype turned on (but not optimized) IE will render pages like this:
http://cdcstudios.com/webpics/cleartypesucks.jpg
(sorry for the filename but I’ve been trying to debug this issue for about 5 straight weeks now) while firefox, safari, opera don’t have this issue even with cleartype on systemwide. While I understand that IE7 is your main focus, this issue exists on IE6 systems as well.
If you or someone on your team could honestly discuss this with me and help find a solution that won’t cause thousands of pages to suddenly look like this resulting in a lot of small businesses needing to pay for fixes to be made to already standards compliant code I’d greatly appreciate it.
Sincerely,
Chris O’Rourke MCSE
http://cdcstudios.com
I Ask that anyone else who feels like this post an email similar to this on their blogs and also send the same email to Mr. Wilson here: CWilso@microsoft.com
For those curious as to what causes this problem it’s an issue with the way the Cleartype engine renders using subpixel text and the way it interacts with opacity settings of text. In the image linked above the text’s opacity is being altered through the use of the moo.fx libraries. The issue has also been reported with a wide variety of other types of scripts, html and css formatting techniques.
Hopefully through enough people reporting this issue and discussing it we can actually make Microsoft try and do their own work for once instead of saddling the design community with the workarounds.
