Poor rendering of non-standard fonts in Chrome on Windows

Question

I'm sure this has been discussed before, but I can't find any canonical question / answer.

Currently, IE9 and Firefox 4+ both use different font rendering that produces (for some) more blurry fonts but overall better kerning and more consistent results. Also, it renders non-standard fonts on Windows much better. I've have not done a thorough investigation, but I think it has to do with the fact that both IE9 and Firefox use now a different graphics layer which in apparently renders fonts differently. Also, the reason some of the standard fonts such as Arial, Tahoma etc. look in Firefox the same as 10 years ago is that it actually has a list of exceptions for them (look for gfx.font_rendering.cleartype_params.force_gdi_classic_for_families).

So far so good. The problem is Chrome. It still uses the old font rendering that makes the non-standard fonts practically unusable. Just for illustration, the font I had in mind was: http://www.google.com/webfonts/specimen/Play. Just open the sample in Firefox/IE9 and Chrome and you should see the difference. Is there anything I can do? Or should I look for a more optimized font.

Update: I see it's a common problem: the headings on http://www.smashingmagazine.com look very jaggy in Chrome.

Update: Sample image:

Answer 1

I have read that Chrome (originally Chromium) has anti-aliasing issues that's why it's jaggy. Using font-faces also makes a difference than using local fonts in your system. So, all we can do is just wait until they fix this issue or help the Chromium Project if you can.

Answer 2

Known issue. You can try gdipp or MacType.