IE 9 does not use sub-pixel antialiasing under certain conditions

Question

[Original title: IE 9 text renders very poorly; is there a workaround?)

IE 9 is rendering the text in my application very poorly. The problem is not in my

Answer 1

IE9 in standard mode uses sub-pixel addressing for text. One can say that it "smooths out" text characters, or you can say the reverse, i.e. it "blurs out" the characters. It is essentially the same thing.

Personally I do not find any easily-perceivable differences between your three images, and actually prefer the first one. However, it depends on personal preferences.

I've searched the web a bit, and it doesn't seem to be a way to cleaning turn off sub-pixel rendering on IE9. This link might interest you: Disable Cleartype (text anti-aliasing) in IE9

In WPF, there is an option to turn off sub-pixel font rendering and force letters to "snap to pixels". But IE9 doesn't seem to have such a switch.

However, my recommendation is: is it that big a problem that you'd want to do it in the first place? If sub-pixel text rendering gives you very ugly output on your site (are you using lots of very small type?), perhaps you'll need to rethink your site layout in the first place. Type that is so small that sub-pixel rendering makes them unclear is best avoided in a web site.

And there is no telling when other browsers will add sub-pixel rendering to text in the future -- in fact FF4 already uses Direct2D, but may not be using DirectWrite.