There is always going to be differences between how browsers display your sites when everyone’s ships are sailing in opposite directions. Unfortunately this is exacerbated to another level when viewing your site in different operating systems. Even more infuriating is that the same browser renders different depending on the OS your using.

I’ve been fine tuning my site for Windows after a relaxing development period in OS X. I didn’t even get past the header when I noticed that it was significantly darker than on my MBP. What makes this funny in a sad, I’m an alcoholic clown who lives in a van down by the river kind of way, is that I was viewing the site using the same browser on the same display!

I hook my MBP up to my display which also shares a connection with my XP PC. So the only difference is the operating system considering that I viewed these both in Safari and Firefox for PC and Mac. What makes this even more strange is that the screen shots I took on both OS actually come out the same!? The browsers can’t render at the right brightness but still come out correct when screenshot? Not sure about that.

Pistol-whipped fonts

Next is font rendering. I took a class with someone once that told me after I took two screenshots of my site, one from Mac, the other PC, that they couldn’t see the differences. Let’s just say their work reflected their that level of observance. Here are two examples of those differences.

Now I don’t know about you, but in the Mac shot I actually see fonts. On the Windohs side I see something I’m embarrassed to have to call my own work. Obviously the text-rendering engine on Windows is different than on a Mac and here we see the results. I’ve tested my sites on IE7 as well which is supposed to be using a newer font-smoothing technique, but it still falls far short of what Mac does naturally.

Nothing new

This is nothing that we haven’t seen before, but it pissed me off enough to write about it again. Anything to be able to write about how crappy Windows is, and I’ll go toe-to-toe with anyone on that subject!