Thought Garage

Google Chrome’s Telugu rendering was awful when it was first released and until a few days ago. The latest version of Google Chrome now renders Telugu fonts quite better (still inferior in crispness to Apple Safari).

Try it out and see for yourself.

When it comes to rendering, the world’s fastest browser, my favorite Google Chrome still has some rough edges. I mean, really some rough edges. It has trouble rendering rounded corners on WordPress login page. See how a WordPress login page is rendered on different browsers. I am on Microsoft Vista.

Google Chrome : Not happy with round edges and shadow

Issues: Round corners are not transparent enough and shows thick black edges. And somehow shows a much wider shadow (compared to Apple Safari)

Apple Safari : The Best

Finest and quite crisp when it comes to rendering content. See how the it stands out from the page and just enough shadow.

Firefox : Just Fine

Renders round edges fine but completely misses out on the shadows. So the form looks more like embedded in to the page rather than standing out floated (like in Apple Safari)

Internet Explorer 7 : Completely ignores round edges, but better than Google Chrome

IE completely ignored round edges and has the same problem with shadows (like Firefox). But looks much better than Google Chrome as there are no black edges.

Apple Safari is the best when it comes to rendering. Its even much better (compared to all others) to render indic scripts (like Telugu). See a clipping of the home page of Andhra daily news paper, Eenadu in Apple Safari. Its beautiful. (Google chrome is worst for rendering Telugu)

In the past I used Internet Explorer for most of my browsing. Then came along Firefox, the open source browser with 100s of cool extensions. I immediately switched to Firefox and never looked back. Well, for some time.

A few months back, I have replaced Firefox with the world’s fastest browser, Google Chrome. Google chrome even without extensions made browsing lot cooler and quicker.

Recently, I downloaded Apple Safari and I immediately fell in love with the way it renders content. Crisp and so easy on your eyes to read. So, these days, I am spending more time on Safari to read content while still using Chrome for general browsing.

One more feather in the cap for Apple Safari. It renders content in Telugu quite beautifully and it is much more easily readable than other browsers. Google Chrome comes last in rendering Telugu content.

Here are some snapshots of Yes To Politics, taken in different browsers. You can see the much crisper image in Apple safari.

Internet Explorer

Firefox

Google Chrome

I have almost stopped using both IE and Firefox. I say, almost, because still there are some web applications (particularly coming from Microsoft itself) doesn’t work in any other browser yet. And while developing websites, extensions on Firefox make life a lot easier.