Most of your time online is spent on reading and comprehending text found all throughout the internet. Traditional font appearance in browsers were not always crisp and clear,which is now being improved dramatically using ClearType.The ever growing popularity of Laptops have been the driving force behind microsoft’s interest toward developments in text for LCD screens.

Microsoft has been conducting research on improving the average IE user’s reading experience for over several years now.Infact microsoft has a Readability Research Group which is responsible for the ongoing development of ClearType.Microsoft has found clear evidence of significant improvements including a 17% increase in word recognition accuracy,5% increase in reading and a 2% improvement in reading comprehension to support their move to enable this feature.

ClearType technology was present in windows XP but failed to enforce it by default.During the beta versions of IE7,this feature was enabled by default which caused some users with older screen displays to be irritated to say the least. With the official release of Internet Explorer 7,a option is present during installation to keep ClearType on.Personally I have found ClearType to be much more crisp and clear compared to when it was not enabled. Also It is suprising Firefox is not enforcing the use of text enhancements such as ClearType even with their new release.

What is ClearType?
ClearType is a software technology developed by Microsoft that improves the readability of text. With ClearType font technology, text on your computer screen has a visual quality much like if it were printed on paper.

How does it work?
ClearType works by accessing the individual vertical color stripe elements in every pixel of an LCD screen. Prior to the development of ClearType, the smallest level of detail that a computer could display was a single pixel, but with ClearType running on an LCD monitor, it is possible to display features of text as small as a fraction of a pixel in width. The extra resolution increases the sharpness of the tiny details in text display, making it much easier to read over long durations.

How do I turn on Turn on/Turn off ClearType?

»While running Internet Explorer 7,click on tools to the top menu

»Click on the Options button to open the internet options window

»while having Internet options window open,Click on the Advanced tab

»Simply scroll down to Multimedia section

    
• Check the first option stating Always use ClearType for HTML*
  to turn it on
• Uncheck the first option stating Always use ClearType for HTML*
  to turn ClearType off

[More info at IEblog]