Silky Smooth Text

okay all you OS Xers out there, first off, Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.2 is out for OS X, which features, amongst other things, text smoothing with the Quartz engine. I’m not sure how I feel about this. I am so used to seeing pages in non-anti-aliased verdana that now that it’s all silky smooth, I’m a bit taken aback.

“No! I forgot to make that text in the build process! Crap! that’s going to kill download times! oh. wait. Nevermind.”

That was my first thing. And then the second thougth was “hmm, it doesn’t look as good with text smoothing turned on.”

The only downside? It resets your home page to be MSN.com. Now, I like my homepage being my homepage. I don’t want MSN.com. So that’s a bit annoying. It does, however, render pages insanely fast. Which is a godsend. Earlier versions left a lot to be desired in this department. now they just need to steal the “tabs” idea from Mozilla.

There’s also a new little app out called “”http://www.unsanity.com/haxies/silk/" onMouseOver=“self.status=‘[outside] :: so silky smooth’; return true” onMouseOut=“self.status=’’; return true” target="_blank">Silk" which will make all apps render text in quartz. Could be cool, could also kill my video card.