Poor font rendering in Windows 8 (blurry text)

This is interesting! Fonts do temporarily appear better when following your instructions! I'm still not sure if they appear as sharp as they do on Chrome or Firefox, but still better. I agree you 're on to something.

I don't know how can we point this any more to Microsoft. Let's hope they will pay attention and release an update - possibly including it within the Windows 8.1 or "blue" update rumored for this summer.

 

I have found some things that at least help with this problem until MS (maybe) decides to fix it.  The first (and most helpful) thing is to make sure that you have all common "web fonts" installed. Windows includes most of them by default, but there are some Mac fonts that are used commonly around the web.  Fonts I have found to be helpful are:

1. Helvetica (the most common Mac and Adobe core font)
2. Lucida Grande (the Mac UI font)
3. Helvetica Neue (the default iOS font)
4. Roboto (Google's newer Android font)
5. Droid (Google's original Android font)

With these installed, Facebook shows HUGE improvement (it uses Lucida Grande) and Yahoo looks better (it uses Helvetica). I'm sure there are other major sites I will notice over time. 

Finding fonts online is sometimes in a "gray area" depending on your local laws, so I will leave the searching up to you.  The following website lists most of the common "web fonts" but it excludes the mobile device ones I listed above:

http://www.seoconsultants.com/fonts/web/

If you have all of these plus Helvetica Neue, Roboto, and Droid you should be in pretty good shape.  Once you have found and downloaded your fonts, follow these instructions to install them:

http://www.groovypost.com/howto/install-fonts-microsoft-windows-8/

Hopefully this at least helps a little bit. At least Facebook is looking A LOT better for me.

Interesting oddity:

1. Open IE's Developer Tools from the menu or by pressing F12.
2. Press CTRL-B or select the mouse pointer icon to select an element in the page.
3. Notice that the font rendering corrects itself.
4. Close Developer Tools.
5. Notice that the font rendering reverts to ugly again.

This is interesting! Fonts do temporarily appear better when following your instructions! I'm still not sure if they appear as sharp as they do on Chrome or Firefox, but still better. I agree you 're on to something.

I don't know how can we point this any more to Microsoft. Let's hope they will pay attention and release an update - possibly including it within the Windows 8.1 or "blue" update rumored for this summer.

Only thing i have tried out is to install chrome frame plugin for IE10.

Which do help the font rendering correctly on most sites, but not all.

http://www.google.com/chromeframe?quickenable=true

That's a good suggestion for now.  You can force Chrome Frame to render pages even if the pages don't make use of CF through meta tags.

You'll need to either preface urls with cf:  (like cf:http://foo.com/)  or make a change in the registry (not sure if Chrome Frame has a UI for the setting now).

http://www.askvg.com/force-microsoft-internet-explorer-to-always-use-google-chrome-frame-to-open-urls/

Only thing i have tried out is to install chrome frame plugin for IE10.

Which do help the font rendering correctly on most sites, but not all.

http://www.google.com/chromeframe?quickenable=true

Interesting oddity:

1. Open IE's Developer Tools from the menu or by pressing F12.
2. Press CTRL-B or select the mouse pointer icon to select an element in the page.
3. Notice that the font rendering corrects itself.
4. Close Developer Tools.
5. Notice that the font rendering reverts to ugly again.

It works as you say.

 

I think you are on to something here. 

 

Perhaps someone with more knowledge than me can tell us why it works and maybe how we can use this oddity to force IE10 to render clear text by default. 

I'm hoping the same thing.  Either someone will tell us what's going on and maybe some way to exploit it or this might help some Microsoft Engineer with a solution.