Google Chrome to Get Microsoft Text Rendering on Windows

The Chromium project has accepted a Microsoft commit that will make text rendering in Chrome and other Chromium-based browsers dramatically better on Windows.

“This feature tracks the work to support picking the contrast and gamma values from the Windows ClearType Text Tuner setting and applying them to Skia [Chromium] text rendering,” the feature commit explains. “This ensures that users’ text rendering preferences are respected on Windows devices.”

This feature commit, called Windows ClearType Text Tuner Integration, is now marked as “Enabled by default” starting in Chromium version 124. So that means it should appear in the April 16 release of Chromium and Chrome in stable.

It could have appeared a lot more quickly: Microsoft announced this technology for the Chromium-based version of Microsoft Edge in June 2021 and shipped it in stable later that year. At the time, the company noted that it hoped “to be able to contribute [this capability] back to Chromium so that all Chromium-based browsers on Windows enjoy a consistent font rendering experience.”

Well, it’s finally happening, at least as much as is possible. As Microsoft notes, Chromium’s use of the Skia text renderer will get Chrome and other web browsers “As close to ClearType support as is currently possible.”

Kudos to Windows Latest for noticing this change.