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This is a well known Mac thing, and its one of the top 5 reasons why I moved away from OSX and refuse to support Apple users. Safari enforces the OSX "thick an

This is a well known Mac thing, and its one of the top 5 reasons why I moved away from OSX and refuse to support Apple users. Safari enforces the OSX "thick antialiasing", causing really thick fonts. This also causes really thick fonts, unreasonably so, in normal non-web apps. The reverse, unfortunately, is true: a lot of web developers worship at the altar of Apple, and have screwed up perfectly good websites by making their fonts too thin: on every other OS, with every other browser thin fonts break. If you are a web developer, for the love of all that is holy, test your website on a normal Windows machine, with a normal 100% DPI conventional monitor, in both Chrome and Firefox. If it misrenders, this is on you, and you will look positively incompetent to the 95% of users visiting your website. Apple users are a vocal minority, they do not represent the silent majority who will easily click away from your website because its unreadable. The fix on OSX, if you're still willing to use that, is `defaults -currentHost write -globalDomain AppleFontSmoothing -int 1`, and if you have a non-Retina display, combined with `defaults write -g CGFontRenderingFontSmoothingDisabled -bool NO` to turn sub-pixel font rendering back on. Defaults are 2 and YES, respectively. AppleFontSmoothing accepts values 0 through 3. 0 is off, 1 is light, 2 is medium, 3 is french roast columbian bold.

kanobo 6y ago
You don't support Apple users on your website? You don't bother to fix breaking issues for any Apple device? I'm genuinely curious to know what industry you work in since that seems like a huge segment of visitors.
- DiabloD3 6y ago
  Any websites that I work on, which I don't often anymore, use standards. If its broken in Safari, then Safari needs to support the agreed upon W3C standards. I don't personally do weird cutting edge stuff, its stuff generally that's been supported in Firefox and Chrome stable for years. Safari must implement these, or be discontinued. However, generally, Mac users have always been below 10% of PC users, most of them opt not to use Safari (over half use Chrome, half of whats left use Firefox, roughly; changes over time); in the mobile space, "100%" use Safari due to the anti-trust stance they have against their largest competitors (even if you install Chrome or Firefox or anything else, it is required to be an unoptimized Safari instance underneath, with zero access to any sort of GPU or Javascript optimization) but only a small fraction of handsets sold have been iPhones. Apple says stuff like, almost 2 billion iPhones have been sold since the introduction of it in 2007, but there are 2 billion active Android devices out there currently. Analysis like https://www.statista.com/statistics/266219/global-smartphone-sales-since-1st-quarter-2009-by-operating-system/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/266219/global-smartphone... (use https://cdn.statcdn.com/Statistic/265000/266219-blank-754.png https://cdn.statcdn.com/Statistic/265000/266219-blank-754.pn... to get around paywall, blue is Android, black is iOS) basically put a nail in Apple's coffin. Like I've said on here before, if you have a lot of Apple users, you should support them. If you are a huge company, you can afford to deal with the monetary and cognitive overhead of dealing with a developer-hostile company. But for average devs in smaller or medium sized businesses? I don't see the point to give Apple users priority over the majority. Treat them just as you would any other OS or any other browser, no special support just for them. They won't pay you more, in fact, Apple makes sure they pay you less via the 30% grab on out-of-app service signups they're shaking down big companies over. The front page of HN is certainly familiar with Apple shakedown stories, at this point it's really hard to argue in favor of supporting Apple anymore than the bare minimum for as little gain as you get.
  - andrewmcwatters 6y ago
    The thing is, I think this font-weight behavior is perfectly standard. The author isn't familiar with the standard at all, however.
  - alwillis 6y ago
    it is required to be an unoptimized Safari instance underneath, with zero access to any sort of GPU or Javascript optimization) but only a small fraction of handsets sold have been iPhones. 3rd party browsers have had access to WKWebView for a while now, so they get almost all the goodies Safari has access to. You can read all about it at "New Chrome for iOS is finally as fast and stable as Safari"--https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2016/01/new-chrome-for-ios-is-finally-as-fast-and-stable-as-safari/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2016/01/new-chrome-for-ios-i.... The iPhone has a little more than 45% of the smartphone market in the United States, which is not nothin’: https://www.statista.com/statistics/236550/percentage-of-us-population-that-own-a-iphone-smartphone/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/236550/percentage-of-us-.... And there are over 1.5 billion active devices in the world--and growing: https://www.macrumors.com/2020/01/28/apple-1-5-billion-active-devices-worldwide/ https://www.macrumors.com/2020/01/28/apple-1-5-billion-activ... The number of devices running the most current version of Android is pretty small compared to the 80-90% of iOS devices that run the most current operating system. That matters for both web developers and native app developers. For example, Android 9.0 Pie is only 32.43% of the installed base of Android users. Which means 60%+ are older versions that don't support the latest web features, etc: https://gs.statcounter.com/android-version-market-share/mobile-tablet/worldwide https://gs.statcounter.com/android-version-market-share/mobi... On the other hand, iOS 13 is installed on 92% of all iPhones sold in the last 4 years: https://www.imore.com/ios-13-has-been-installed-92-iphones-released-last-4-years https://www.imore.com/ios-13-has-been-installed-92-iphones-r... Anyone who’s website is used by US smartphone users by definition has a lot of iPhone customers.
andrewmcwatters 6y ago
You're describing anti-aliasing, not font-weight.
- DiabloD3 6y ago
  OSX font anti-aliasing adds about one weight to font rendering, its a known bug on Apple platforms. Apple is aware of it, considers it a feature, and won't fix. Eventually the command line fixes won't work either.
  - andrewmcwatters 6y ago
    You do raise an interesting point about anti-aliasing adding to weights creating an "equivalent weight" of sorts to the font. Thanks for mentioning this, it's made me think differently about font rasterization.
crazygringo 6y ago
It's true that Mac has different font rendering, but this is not that. This article is about "faux bold", which is intentionally faking a bolder text. This goes way beyond any antialiasing preferences. You're describing Mac-style antialiasing, which has nothing to do with this article. (Also your description of thin fonts isn't even correct. Thin fonts, if rendered mathematically correctly e.g. converted to curves in Photoshop, are too thin to be legibile at small sizes period. Mac compensates by giving heaviler antialiasing, while Windows compensates with hinting that forces strokes to be a full pixel wide. They look different, but there's no widespread problem of fonts being too thin on Windows.)
reaperducer 6y ago
This is a well known Mac thing, and its one of the top 5 reasons why I moved away from OSX and refuse to support Apple users Seriously? You changed operating environments because of font weights? That seems a little over-the-top.
- solarkraft 6y ago
  Only on Safari, even. Yet this comment over all brings up a good point (re: downvotes).
paulie_a 6y ago
Some people are passionate about fonts. I think I am the opposite, I override all custom styles with a single font family and a very limited range of sizes. I can just hear designers crying out, but long ago I started doing to that, the web looks so much better when that design decision is eliminated. Even good use of fonts unnecessary.

kanobo 6y ago

You don't support Apple users on your website? You don't bother to fix breaking issues for any Apple device? I'm genuinely curious to know what industry you work in since that seems like a huge segment of visitors.

DiabloD3 6y ago
Any websites that I work on, which I don't often anymore, use standards. If its broken in Safari, then Safari needs to support the agreed upon W3C standards. I don't personally do weird cutting edge stuff, its stuff generally that's been supported in Firefox and Chrome stable for years. Safari must implement these, or be discontinued. However, generally, Mac users have always been below 10% of PC users, most of them opt not to use Safari (over half use Chrome, half of whats left use Firefox, roughly; changes over time); in the mobile space, "100%" use Safari due to the anti-trust stance they have against their largest competitors (even if you install Chrome or Firefox or anything else, it is required to be an unoptimized Safari instance underneath, with zero access to any sort of GPU or Javascript optimization) but only a small fraction of handsets sold have been iPhones. Apple says stuff like, almost 2 billion iPhones have been sold since the introduction of it in 2007, but there are 2 billion active Android devices out there currently. Analysis like https://www.statista.com/statistics/266219/global-smartphone-sales-since-1st-quarter-2009-by-operating-system/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/266219/global-smartphone... (use https://cdn.statcdn.com/Statistic/265000/266219-blank-754.png https://cdn.statcdn.com/Statistic/265000/266219-blank-754.pn... to get around paywall, blue is Android, black is iOS) basically put a nail in Apple's coffin. Like I've said on here before, if you have a lot of Apple users, you should support them. If you are a huge company, you can afford to deal with the monetary and cognitive overhead of dealing with a developer-hostile company. But for average devs in smaller or medium sized businesses? I don't see the point to give Apple users priority over the majority. Treat them just as you would any other OS or any other browser, no special support just for them. They won't pay you more, in fact, Apple makes sure they pay you less via the 30% grab on out-of-app service signups they're shaking down big companies over. The front page of HN is certainly familiar with Apple shakedown stories, at this point it's really hard to argue in favor of supporting Apple anymore than the bare minimum for as little gain as you get.
- andrewmcwatters 6y ago
  The thing is, I think this font-weight behavior is perfectly standard. The author isn't familiar with the standard at all, however.
- alwillis 6y ago
  it is required to be an unoptimized Safari instance underneath, with zero access to any sort of GPU or Javascript optimization) but only a small fraction of handsets sold have been iPhones. 3rd party browsers have had access to WKWebView for a while now, so they get almost all the goodies Safari has access to. You can read all about it at "New Chrome for iOS is finally as fast and stable as Safari"--https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2016/01/new-chrome-for-ios-is-finally-as-fast-and-stable-as-safari/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2016/01/new-chrome-for-ios-i.... The iPhone has a little more than 45% of the smartphone market in the United States, which is not nothin’: https://www.statista.com/statistics/236550/percentage-of-us-population-that-own-a-iphone-smartphone/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/236550/percentage-of-us-.... And there are over 1.5 billion active devices in the world--and growing: https://www.macrumors.com/2020/01/28/apple-1-5-billion-active-devices-worldwide/ https://www.macrumors.com/2020/01/28/apple-1-5-billion-activ... The number of devices running the most current version of Android is pretty small compared to the 80-90% of iOS devices that run the most current operating system. That matters for both web developers and native app developers. For example, Android 9.0 Pie is only 32.43% of the installed base of Android users. Which means 60%+ are older versions that don't support the latest web features, etc: https://gs.statcounter.com/android-version-market-share/mobile-tablet/worldwide https://gs.statcounter.com/android-version-market-share/mobi... On the other hand, iOS 13 is installed on 92% of all iPhones sold in the last 4 years: https://www.imore.com/ios-13-has-been-installed-92-iphones-released-last-4-years https://www.imore.com/ios-13-has-been-installed-92-iphones-r... Anyone who’s website is used by US smartphone users by definition has a lot of iPhone customers.

andrewmcwatters 6y ago

You're describing anti-aliasing, not font-weight.

DiabloD3 6y ago
OSX font anti-aliasing adds about one weight to font rendering, its a known bug on Apple platforms. Apple is aware of it, considers it a feature, and won't fix. Eventually the command line fixes won't work either.
- andrewmcwatters 6y ago
  You do raise an interesting point about anti-aliasing adding to weights creating an "equivalent weight" of sorts to the font. Thanks for mentioning this, it's made me think differently about font rasterization.

crazygringo 6y ago

It's true that Mac has different font rendering, but this is not that. This article is about "faux bold", which is intentionally faking a bolder text. This goes way beyond any antialiasing preferences. You're describing Mac-style antialiasing, which has nothing to do with this article. (Also your description of thin fonts isn't even correct. Thin fonts, if rendered mathematically correctly e.g. converted to curves in Photoshop, are too thin to be legibile at small sizes period. Mac compensates by giving heaviler antialiasing, while Windows compensates with hinting that forces strokes to be a full pixel wide. They look different, but there's no widespread problem of fonts being too thin on Windows.)

reaperducer 6y ago

This is a well known Mac thing, and its one of the top 5 reasons why I moved away from OSX and refuse to support Apple users Seriously? You changed operating environments because of font weights? That seems a little over-the-top.

solarkraft 6y ago
Only on Safari, even. Yet this comment over all brings up a good point (re: downvotes).

paulie_a 6y ago

Some people are passionate about fonts. I think I am the opposite, I override all custom styles with a single font family and a very limited range of sizes. I can just hear designers crying out, but long ago I started doing to that, the web looks so much better when that design decision is eliminated. Even good use of fonts unnecessary.