title: Font Smoothing Techniques?  text-shadow rendering differently in Chrome 14.0.833.0 or higher
body: <blockquote>
  <h3>EDIT:</h3>
  <p>We're in Chrome 19 now, and this still isn't fixed. Just a clarification: this happens in Chrome on Windows, not Linux or Mac. I think it has to do with Cleartype. Google, please fix this.</p>
  </blockquote>
  <p>I've been using CSS3 <code>text-shadow</code> to emulate IE9's font smoothing on other browsers. Basically I've just set the text-shadow of a container's text to the container's background. You can see the behavior by setting <code>text-shadow</code> on a largish font element in anything lower than Chrome 14.0.833. The text looks smooth. Remove the text-shadow and the font looks jagged.
  However, in Chrome 14.0.833 (UPDATE: appears it's also &quot;broken&quot; in 14.0.834) this no longer works. The text-shadow property still works, but not in the way it did before. You can see the behavior <a href="http://jsbin.com/ayepuq/edit#preview" rel="nofollow noreferrer">here</a> (just load it up with diff. Chrome versions)
  It seems as if in the older Chromes the text shadow began inside the text just a little and then spread out - which is perhaps why the text-shadow hack worked. In the newer Chrome, it appears the text shadow starts just <em>outside</em> the text, which is why it won't work. See what I mean <a href="http://jsbin.com/ayepuq/3/edit#preview" rel="nofollow noreferrer">here</a>.</p>
  <p>My question is basically: <em><strong>Is this a bug? Which is expected behavior, if either? Are there any other font smoothing workarounds I can use?</strong></em></p>
  <p>The W3C's <a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/css3-text/#text-shadow" rel="nofollow noreferrer">spec</a> didn't seem to say what the intended behavior is, though I did see that perhaps I should be using text-outline (which is kinda unsupported, which defeats the purpose)</p>