How do I switch the Font Smoothing OFF completely in Safari 3.1.2?

Safari has no control over font smoothing; that's something controlled by Windows itself.

Mulder

You're half right, Mulder. While Windows has its own font smoothing settings, turning it off still results in smooth text in Safari (but not Opera nor Firefox). So in this case, Safari IS at fault.

That may be true, but I never said Windows was at fault; only that Safari has no control for this.

Mulder

For Safari, set your font to "Trebuchet MS".

Also set font smoothing to low. It's as crisp as it gets.

(Safari uses it's own font smoothing that cannot be completely disabled. It's based on the rendering system.)

I searched the web and maybe the whole Apple Discussions for this problem*. It's amazing how some people just says "I like font smoothing", others "don't like font smoothimg", "it's a Windows problem", "it's an Apple problem" but the solution itself, none. To be honest, not even me. The point is that I want to completely disable the Safari feature (and Safari alone, the only software that presents me font smoothing).

I've tryed several things like mess up with preferences, use a nightly build of Webkit and some other mad science, all no effects.

The last solution is we all who wants to have the feature "no font smooting at all" report that to Apple. One request only doesn't make any difference, but if we all request that they may pay attention.

Ah ! Above I mean:
Go to "Help", "Report bugs to Apple" and then request for "I want a completly disable smoothing"

I would suggest, if you don't like the way Safari is rendering fonts, try another browser.

There's lots of them out there. Safari works well as it was intended, but for some intentions (like no font smoothing and other issues), no so much.

Firefox and IE both use the operating system's font smoothing settings. Safari does not.

Reverse_Parn, I respectfully disagree. But as soon as we are discussiong the usage or not of Safari we are missing the point of this whole thread.

In my own case, I am a web architect who needs to test my applications in Safari. I have to use. For regular browsing, I use Firefox or Chrome.

There are a software design rule (by Apple, if I am not mistaken) that says "you can't limit your software just because you think that doesn't make sense. Some things don't make sense to you, but makes a lot of sense to other people."

... you're missing the point.

You can test Safari just fine with Font Smoothing.

How is font smoothing stopping you?

I apreciate your interest.

In the application I develop and test there is a small debug window (flyout, actually), with 9px of font size wich is quite hard to read. I'm not saying the font smoothing is stopping me to use Safari, but my life would be better without it. I bet you would ask me to size up the font size of my debug window, but then again we're missing the whole point. I wish Safari has the font smoothing off simply because would give me a better readbility and without that I would not need to size up (or change) fonts or even could use it to navigate in my favorite sites.

Software must adapt to us, not the opposite.

I use Safari specifically for the way it displays text.

If you would like to change the way Safari renders text, the software is available via WebKit, where you can make changes to the rendering process.

There doesn't seem to be enough demand for this feature, otherwise Apple might include it.