We are seeing a growing trend on the web of platform diversification. There have always been a variety of operating systems and browsers on the web, but for sometime the vast majority of users have been Windows/IE. In recent years this trend has been changing, first with Firefox and now with the expanding adoption of OS X. The result is an increase in the diversity of commonly used web browsing platforms.
I recently encountered some issues relating to how fonts are rendered in different platforms. I was commented on a friend’s blog that I found it hard to read the code sections of his blog as the font rendered quite small.
Having recently moved to a Mac OS X system for development in conjunction with Parallels running Windows XP allows me to review and test several web browsing platforms from a single machine. My results are below:
(Click for view full size image!)
Note that in Safari the text is so small and choppy that it is nearly unreadable.
(Click for view full size image!)
Arial tends to be much more uniform in display size across all examples.
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Special thanks to Jeffry Houser
