Fuzzy, blurry vision in Yosemite...

It's because of the new light/thin font they are using. It's all hideous. Not much you can do other than suffer and get used to it. Apparently looks nice on Retina. I have Retina MacBook Pro and it doesn't. It's bloody *****! And apparently Apple are rather big on typography! Could not be further from the truth. You can try change the font smoothing to be slightly heavier but it still won't look better. Sorry chap.

It's not JUST because of the font -EVERYTHING is so blurry I feel like Mr.Friggin Magoo. Seriously, it's absolutely ridiculous. I can see (&read) a website clearly on my tiny iphone 5s held up right next to my 15-inch MacBook Pro displaying the same site which now looks like abstract art. Since this is the beta version, hopefully there will be a big enough of an outcry for this to be improved.

I'm having this problem as well. Brand new MacBook Pro, 15" running Yosemite 10.10.1. It is not ONLY fonts, as noted, but some icons, even the red, yellow, green circles in the upper left corner to expand, minimize, and close windows. But only in SOME applications. (Microsoft Office being one suite, though not the only. Some Adobe applications and others as well.) The very same red/yellow/green icons and other menu bar items appear fine in other applications. (Chrome, the Finder, numerous others.) The visual is like it is pixelated or low-resolution. With regard to fonts, it harkens back to the days when it meant you were missing a screen font. But again, this is not solely with regard to fonts.

I've also reduced transparency and tried turning off LCD font smoothing, as suggested by many. No difference. This is pretty awful. The issue with the menus and icons is irritating but not debilitating. The issue with text, however, renders some core applications (such as Microsoft Word where text is the core of the application) — and therefore the computer itself — essentially unusable.

Please tell me this is being fixed! Has anyone seen a response from Apple anywhere? A solution that works not only for fonts against transparency?

Oddly, mine does not do this. It looks fine in many applications, but for those on which it looks bad, it always looks bad. I am actually on the verge of wiping my hard drive clean, and re-installing the OS, then installing just one app first (MS Office) to see if the problem is there. If it is, I may re-wipe the hard drive and see if I can install Mavericks instead. It's a new machine, so (unfortunately) came with Yosemite pre-installed.

Ugh.

Looks like this may be an issue of applications' developers not yet having updated their code for compatibility with Yosemite. I just resolved it for Microsoft Office 2011, which as it turned out had two patches (one being version 14.4.7) that for some reason had not yet been picked up when I installed it. Once I installed them, all blurriness (menus as well as text in the application itself) is GONE.

So, I suspect that over time, other applications may also (hopefully) update.

Okay, that's odd. I'd have thought AutoCAD just hasn't fully updated to patch it in their software, but the others are all native Apple apps. I haven't seen this with Apple's applications on my machine. Just third-party apps and some specific windows, like software updaters and installers.

I also would think it could have to do with the fact that you don't have a Retina display (if I'm not mistaken), if the OS is built to assume you do. But that doesn't explain the fact that it sometimes looks fine. The fact that it goes back and forth is really dumbfounding to me, I have to admit.

Yikes. I wish I knew. I'm stumped. Sorry!

I have turned on Dark Menu bar in Yosemite in order to differentiate between active items in the dropdown menus vs inactive items (which did the trick because before there was little difference between white vs greyed items) BUT now Spotlight types my search terms in black on a black background, so that I cannot see what I am typing or have typed!

If I am lucky enough to blindly finish typing my search terms correctly, the hits show up in white on black, so I can see them; but if I make a typo in my search term, nothing of course shows up and I can't see what I typed so I can't correct it!

Is there a solution for this!?

Or do I have to choose between distinguishing the menubar items vs using Spotlight?

Nate

Have you ever figured out what is going on?

I have a 2009 mac pro and a cinema display and just like you, the text is sometimes razor sharp and sometimes I think I have the wrong glasses on. And just like you, in Mail some of the panes are sharp while others are blurry, but only SOMETIMES. I'm wondering if sometimes its accessing a wrong font? Even finder menus are sometimes blurry and sometimes not. In mail, the font in the preview pane will be blurry, but if you open the message in a new window, the EXACT SAME font and size will be razor sharp, side by side. Its frustrating that its intermittent. I can't figure out any common thread for when it goes blurry. Please post if you have any advice.

Hey guys! Don't know if anyone will still be reading this but I hope this piece of information helps.

I am a gamer and it's great to play Win games on a Mac with a WineSkin. I have recently been playing Fallout 3 GOTY and after I finish playing, the clarity of text seems to be affected. After restarting, everything returns to normal.

I don't know the exact cause and I can't pinpoint a problem to offer a more specific solution but restarting seems to help. There may be issues with some programs moving between applications optimised for Retina displays and those which are not. Could a residual background process from an non optimised app also cause blurry text?

I also have XQuartz installed to facilitate the use of apps cross platform. Please see this note: "As of version 2.7.7, X11.app/XQuartz does not expose support for high-resolution Retina Displays to X11 apps, which run in pixel-doubled mode on high-resolution displays."

I hope this information helps someone and brings us all closer to some sort of answer.

Andrew