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As others have noted this is a hilariously bad post, because in practice Windows (which is so enthusiastically praised here) is incredibly inconsistent in font

As others have noted this is a hilariously bad post, because in practice Windows (which is so enthusiastically praised here) is incredibly inconsistent in font rendering program by program, and on most non-hidpi screens looks like trash. Especially when using scaled displays (such as 1.25 or 1.5x scaling on a 4k screen), where half of software turns into a blurry, unreadable mess.

neilalexander 8y ago
As seen even in Windows itself, including but not limited to various places in the Control Panel. The situation is even worse if you are a laptop user that sometimes connects to external displays with a different pixel densities. Things will often either get upscaled or downscaled depending upon the display used at the point that the application was opened, sometimes requiring the application to be closed and re-opened to render at the correct resolution or - worse still - requiring you to log out of Windows and back in again! Trying to use high-DPI displays on Windows is an unmitigated nightmare.
- Mister_Snuggles 8y ago
  My big question about this is Why? Why is Windows such a mess about this and how did Apple manage to pull it off with virtually no fanfare? For a while was connecting a Retina MBP to two non-Retina monitors. Sometimes, when dragging a window from the laptop display to a non-Retina monitor I'd see a flash of everything scaled up. Other than that, I've seen none of the problems that seem to still plague Windows 10. I'm sure the answer has to do with the history of Windows - I'd love to see someone like Raymond Chen dig deep into this.
  - wbond 8y ago
    The why has to do with how Windows and macOS approached scaling. On macOS, to get anything above 100%, you render the whole interface at 200% (including layout), and the OS scales the resulting pixel output to the display's scale. On Windows, every application has to detect the scale of the monitor it is being displayed on and do layout at the exact scale. (Actually, that isn't entirely true, if you wrote an app before the high dpi additions, you always render at 100% and Window scales it up for you, which results in a blurry mess.) It is very easy for layouts at 125% to have gaps and varying width lines depending on where on the device pixels the coordinates land. Adding mixed high DPI support to Sublime Text for Mac was very simple compared to adding it for Windows. On Mac the OS tells us when to render at 200%, and everything in regards to layout is then doubled. On Windows we have to re-layout and snap dimensions to device pixel boundaries to get something that looks crisp when moving a window from one display to another. The code changes were far more invasive for Windows. We support high dpi on Linux, but haven't added mixed high DPI support yet. Gnome limits users to integer scales (1.0, 2.0, 3.0), but with tweak tools it is possible to get fractional scaling. All of those are fine, it is just when you need to re-layout in fractional scales on the fly that you have to expose the scale of the current display to the entire UI library, or sometimes have gaps and overlaps.
- snazz 8y ago
  Try looking at Computer Management on a partial-scaled display (125% ish). It’s impressively bad.
- Spivak 8y ago
  I think Microsoft did the best they could since HiDPI requires the app to cooperate with the OS and supporting three separate modes makes it so more applications can actually work even if it's annoying. - Some apps are DPI unaware and just get scaled by the OS at the pixel level. - Some apps are DPI aware but only at startup. If you move screens they need to be restarted. - Some apps can dynamically switch their DPI and respond to the OS prods to change.
- leokennis 8y ago
  Actually Windows 7 was better than Windows 10. Technically W10 is superior (different scaling % per display, because every display will have a different DPI) but in practice, on W7 you had the same scaling everywhere (less ideal), but also crisp text everywhere. In W10 you have different scaling but the display with the lowest scaling factor will have blurry text everywhere...
- wrs 8y ago
  I haven’t worked on Windows in quite a while, but IIRC one problem is there are three different font renderers in there. And nobody ever goes back and fixes old parts of Windows when new ways of doing things are invented. So it’s pretty easy to end up with a screen showing as many as three different renderings of three different system fonts. I used to have a fun way to demo this where you dive through the archaeological UI and rendering eras (including XP-style control panel, with a hideous sidebar link hover rendering bug that I don’t think ever got fixed) until you end up at the iSCSI control panel, which I think may be literally unchanged since the year 2000.

neilalexander 8y ago

As seen even in Windows itself, including but not limited to various places in the Control Panel. The situation is even worse if you are a laptop user that sometimes connects to external displays with a different pixel densities. Things will often either get upscaled or downscaled depending upon the display used at the point that the application was opened, sometimes requiring the application to be closed and re-opened to render at the correct resolution or - worse still - requiring you to log out of Windows and back in again! Trying to use high-DPI displays on Windows is an unmitigated nightmare.

Mister_Snuggles 8y ago
My big question about this is Why? Why is Windows such a mess about this and how did Apple manage to pull it off with virtually no fanfare? For a while was connecting a Retina MBP to two non-Retina monitors. Sometimes, when dragging a window from the laptop display to a non-Retina monitor I'd see a flash of everything scaled up. Other than that, I've seen none of the problems that seem to still plague Windows 10. I'm sure the answer has to do with the history of Windows - I'd love to see someone like Raymond Chen dig deep into this.
- wbond 8y ago
  The why has to do with how Windows and macOS approached scaling. On macOS, to get anything above 100%, you render the whole interface at 200% (including layout), and the OS scales the resulting pixel output to the display's scale. On Windows, every application has to detect the scale of the monitor it is being displayed on and do layout at the exact scale. (Actually, that isn't entirely true, if you wrote an app before the high dpi additions, you always render at 100% and Window scales it up for you, which results in a blurry mess.) It is very easy for layouts at 125% to have gaps and varying width lines depending on where on the device pixels the coordinates land. Adding mixed high DPI support to Sublime Text for Mac was very simple compared to adding it for Windows. On Mac the OS tells us when to render at 200%, and everything in regards to layout is then doubled. On Windows we have to re-layout and snap dimensions to device pixel boundaries to get something that looks crisp when moving a window from one display to another. The code changes were far more invasive for Windows. We support high dpi on Linux, but haven't added mixed high DPI support yet. Gnome limits users to integer scales (1.0, 2.0, 3.0), but with tweak tools it is possible to get fractional scaling. All of those are fine, it is just when you need to re-layout in fractional scales on the fly that you have to expose the scale of the current display to the entire UI library, or sometimes have gaps and overlaps.
snazz 8y ago
Try looking at Computer Management on a partial-scaled display (125% ish). It’s impressively bad.
Spivak 8y ago
I think Microsoft did the best they could since HiDPI requires the app to cooperate with the OS and supporting three separate modes makes it so more applications can actually work even if it's annoying. - Some apps are DPI unaware and just get scaled by the OS at the pixel level. - Some apps are DPI aware but only at startup. If you move screens they need to be restarted. - Some apps can dynamically switch their DPI and respond to the OS prods to change.
leokennis 8y ago
Actually Windows 7 was better than Windows 10. Technically W10 is superior (different scaling % per display, because every display will have a different DPI) but in practice, on W7 you had the same scaling everywhere (less ideal), but also crisp text everywhere. In W10 you have different scaling but the display with the lowest scaling factor will have blurry text everywhere...
wrs 8y ago
I haven’t worked on Windows in quite a while, but IIRC one problem is there are three different font renderers in there. And nobody ever goes back and fixes old parts of Windows when new ways of doing things are invented. So it’s pretty easy to end up with a screen showing as many as three different renderings of three different system fonts. I used to have a fun way to demo this where you dive through the archaeological UI and rendering eras (including XP-style control panel, with a hideous sidebar link hover rendering bug that I don’t think ever got fixed) until you end up at the iSCSI control panel, which I think may be literally unchanged since the year 2000.