Poor font rendering in Windows 8 (blurry text)

A few dozen or so years ago, a few visionaries siad everyone woudl have a computer. "What for? What'll they do with them.? "  "Well, recipes, and uh, er um. . . "

Turns out most people only needed toys and that's what their buying. Some folks need machines to do work but most, just need the gadget with the bird games and email-- no disk, no print, no work, jsut chat and play. Used to be you had to have a pc to chat or play. Now you jsut need a phone.

It's not that MS went with the wrong market, they just didn't get the text rendering correct for the small and shrinking PC market.

I just don't understand the rationale behind this decision. Catering to the tablet market is NOT going to work. You should realize this. Apple and Android have a stranglehold on that market. When people want to go buy a tablet, the first thing that comes to mind is "I want an iPad." 

However not everyone wants a tablet. Some of us actually need a real machine capable of doing actual productive work. And when we need a real machine, the first thing that comes to mind (for me, anyway) is "I want a Windows PC." No matter how big the tablet market gets, no matter how many apple fan boys wave their d*cks at every iDevice is throw their way, there will always be a market for a good desktop operating system. UNLESS you screw it up. And that is just what you are doing. You are never going to sell as many PCs as your did 10 years ago. Times have changed and it's a fact of life. You should be concentrating on holding on to your base and distinguishing Windows from mobile OS's, not trying to become one. You should be touting the benefits of terabyte HDDs, solid state drives, 3.4 GHz CPUs, 32 gigs of Ram, etc. because the more you try and cater to the iPhanboys, the more you screw up and lose your own market.

Well Bill, it is good at last to have a message from inside the circle of wagons. Thank you. But, oh dear! - Microsoft has so missed the point. I am just going to have to save up for a Mac if this is not sorted. But from what one can read of the 8.1 being shipped to manufacturers there seems no hope of that by release in October. There is a saying on this side of the pond about not being able to run a p*ss-up in a brewery. That must be a course lots of folks at Redmond have been on.

During Windows 8 development, our engineers and researchers looked at where the industry was heading, and the important challenges we’d need to address in the future. There were several data points that needed to be addressed; lower powered devices that have trouble keeping up with modern graphics, a wide variety of display types that vary in size, orientation and pixel density, and finally a richer array of web authoring techniques that push the boundaries of web and graphics capabilities.

 

In order to deliver in all these areas, a new grayscale text rendering mode was added to the ClearType family. This new ClearType rendering mode gives applications the ability to enhance the performance of text especially for rich web scenarios, keeping the experience fast and fluid. In developing these new ClearType text modes, engineers and researchers improved the default tunings for these new modes, and updated a number of inbox fonts to ensure they look great in these new modes as well. Our older, color-based ClearType modes still exist for use on Windows, as you can see in a number of applications; but they work better for a different set of apps with a different set of goals around performance and the display ecosystem they run on.

 

With all of this said, every person experiences text differently, and with a wide variety of displays it becomes necessary to tune the text for each person and their preferences. In order to easily allow customers to tailor these new ClearType modes, Windows 8 includes an updated ClearType tuner. The changes introduced in this new version allow users to tune these text modes to work better in conjunction with their visual system, display attributes, and personal preferences. In order to run the updated ClearType tuner, press WIN+Q and type “ClearType Tuner” in the search box. Then select “settings” below it. Then select the result that says “Adjust ClearType Text.”

I already tried the f-ing 'adjust cleartype text' before I went to this forum, and I guess the Adjust cleartype text is broken as no matter what options I select the font stays having the same ugly aliasing, I can't get it to go back the way it was rendered in Windows 7.. How about just freaking make an option like 'Windows 7 rendering' so I don't have to go through a wizard which let's me choose between texts which I can hardly see any difference between and certainly because it's only a little box of text, and it has a lot of them next to each other it's harder (for me at least) to really distinguish them.. How about not treating users as freaking todlers and let users at least have an option to set the specified parameters themselves, as that's what is done through the wizard anyway.. But just fix the freaking ugly rendering as I'm getting more and more fed up with Windows 8 on a desktop, trying to stuff a mobile based OS down our throats, I can freaking multitask, I don't need full screen space wasting apps, that's for big finger controlled devices...

And also you tell us that the original rendering is still available, well then just tell us which registry-settings we have to change to get the rendering of the text (in IE!!) back the way it was as in Windows 7.

Google Chrome (desktop, Windows 8 app not tested) provides the ability to disable fonts anti-aliasing just like Adobe Acrobat Reader (desktop) but Windows and Internet Explorer don't provide it at all (IE 9 & 10) or not fully (Windows 8). I absolutely need it to read comfortably on my laptop though. Yes, no anti-aliasing at all is way better for me to read text.

Do you really believe your competitors got it all wrong?

Browser usage statistics:

September 2008: Internet Explorer, 49% / Google Chrome, 3.1%

August 2013: Internet Explorer, 11.8% / Google Chrome, 52.9%

http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp

Conclusion: maybe a simplistic summary but, somehow, follow the lead or die...