Microsoft is making Chrome’s text rendering better on Windows

Microsoft has committed changes to Chromium that will improve text rendering on Windows machines. Following years of complaints, Chrome version 124 will finally support contrast and gamma values from the Windows ClearType Text Tuner for text rendering in Google’s browser.

This change should mean Chrome will finally match the improvements Microsoft made to Edge for font and text rendering, so you can apply text contrast enhancements and gamma correction to improve the readability of text on webpages. Chrome uses Skia for text rendering with hard-coded values for contrast and gamma, so it wasn’t picking up the improvements that ClearType has to offer.

Microsoft’s ClearType font technology has long been used in Windows to improve text rendering on screens, with the aim of making text look like it was printed on a piece of paper. Now, Neowin has spotted that Microsoft engineers have integrated ClearType Text Tuner support into Chrome so it picks up any changes to contrast and gamma, just like most other native Windows apps.

Kurt Catti-Schmidt, a senior software development engineer at Microsoft, has led the push here. Catti-Schmidt has been on a mission to improve text rendering on Chromium-based browsers in recent months and regularly focuses on accessibility improvements to both Edge and Chrome.

These latest changes are part of Microsoft’s commitment to improving Chromium-based browsers on Windows after the company made the move to Chromium in its own Edge browser more than five years ago. At the time, Microsoft said it would “offer our Windows platform expertise to improve the experience of all Chromium-based browsers on Windows,” and that promise has held true. Microsoft has helped improve scrolling in Chrome, touch support, and much more.