OptimizeLegibility extensions for Safari and Chrome make text on the Web look better

Here's one for the font nerds: there's a CSS declaration called optimizeLegibility that fixes kerning and ligatures in a lot of Web fonts. For the less design-savvy amongst us, that means it makes sure certain letter pairs are spaced properly and combined into special characters where appropriate. Designers don't always use optimizeLegibility, though, so it's time to take matters into your own hands with an extension for Safari or Chrome.
The extensions just insert an optimizeLegibility declaration into the CSS of any page, so they're super-lightweight and won't increase page load times at all. The Safari version is by Chris Morrell, and the Chrome version is by John Michel. Firefox users, don't worry: optimizeLegibility is on by default for text sizes 20px and larger.












Comments
4
Subscribe to commentsJonnyAug 11th 2010 12:27PM
Anyone else think that the before looks better then the after? I find the after examples slightly more blurry.
Jay HathawayAug 11th 2010 12:30PM
There may have been some loss of quality in my screenshot. The only difference is the proper letter spacing. I don't believe optimizeLegibility does anything with anti-aliasing or changes the sharpness/blurriness of the text.
giupAug 11th 2010 1:15PM
And why exactly the Chrome extensions wants access to my data on all websites and to all my browsing history?
SilverWaveAug 11th 2010 1:33PM
Note: Correct font smoothing in Firefox
This setting is key, by default (20) its almost never used.
As I wanted text to be optimized for display quality I set
browser.display.auto_quality_min_font_size = 0
http://silverwav.wordpress.com/2010/05/17/note-proper-font-smoothing-in-firefox/