Comment by pulsartwin

> I imagine this behavior came from ClearType having been a special case, and therefore non-native widget toolkits getting explicitly programmed to render with it on Windows, forgetting that the user should be able to turn it off!!

I see, that is indeed frustrating.

> Once every Mac shipped with a Retina display, there was no need to retain that compromise, because you already get high resolution so you may as well get color accuracy too.

I believe that is Apple's position, and it may be valid for their own high-DPI displays. However, it overlooks the fact that most external monitors, especially typical office displays, are still far from retina pixel densities. Even on a relatively good 27" 4K panel, text on macOS looks noticably worse than on Windows or Linux. Then again, that's likely compounded by the lack of fractional scaling. Unless you're using a 5-6K external display, you aren't hitting 250+ PPI to get crisp text at all.

> I will note macOS still enables by default a feature called "stem darkening" (incorrectly called "font smoothing" in macOS Settings) that also looks fairly awful to my eye, and seems itself a legacy from the low-DPI days.

Yea, I've seen quite the range of stem darkening implementations. Skipping proper gamma-correct blending in many doesn't help.

The really annoying thing nowadays is renderers attempting to apply subpixel rendering to panels that aren't even RGB/BGR in the first place.