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Why is it that my website appears different on Mac and Windows? Words on my website when viewed on Mac are more clear, while on Windows they aren't very legible. The font I am using is Georgia sans-serif.

If its some rendering technique difference, can anybody suggest some font which looks same on both.


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Which browser are you looking at? –  David Johnstone Jul 14 '10 at 5:34
@David Johnstone - Doesn't matter which browser I look at. On Windows, all browsers display the same illegible font. –  vikkun Jul 14 '10 at 6:55
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closed as off topic by Jeff Atwood Jul 14 '10 at 6:03


3 Answers

up vote 1 down vote accepted

What fonts are you using as fall-back, in case the font isn't on the client? What size are you setting them, using which unit of measurement (px/em/%, etc)? Isn't Georgia a serif font?

Screen shot and CSS examples would be useful to know for sure, but the in their absence, one possible cause which comes to mind is the OS font-smoothing.

Mac OS has great font anti-aliasing turned on by default, whereas Windows XP users have go into their display settings to enable it (many don't, through lack of knowledge). Even then, XP users have 2 choices: plain "font smoothing" (poor), or "ClearType" (awesome).

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The font used must be available on the machine you're using, you cant just use any font. If you use a font that doesnt exist on a machine, a default will be used instead.

a link on safe web fonts: http://web.mit.edu/jmorzins/www/fonts.html

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The font I am using - Georgia, is there on the machines that I am seeing the site on and it is also there in the safe web fonts list suggested. –  vikkun Jul 14 '10 at 6:52
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Because Mac uses blurry-all-bold font rendering.

Seriously though, fonts render differently on different platforms. Here is a list of all web-safe-ish fonts with screenshots on how they look on Mac/Windows.

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Don't know why you got downvoted so +1. Mac does indeed use a much bolder than normal font rendering, and it is blurrier than in Windows (altough this looks good on bigger font sizes, but come on, a desktop doesn't have a retina display). –  Camilo Martin May 18 '12 at 17:44
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