I remember the day the new font rasterizer was turned on in Safari for Windows. I couldn’t believe my eyes; something was wrong with text rendering. I was caught off guard when my manager said “Its supposed to look like that”. I had to prove the others that this was wrong, so I fired up Safari on the Mac, took screenshots, loaded them in Photoshop – only to discover they were the same. How could this be?
The reason I was shocked was because it didn’t look like Windows. After about a day of use, the shock wore off, I decided I liked the the new text rendering better.
The Antigrain team recently ran an article about their Font rasterization research. It is totally is worth the read.