Firefox looks the best to me; Chrome the worst. IE is not great either, but it is better at larger font sizes than Chrome (IMO).
You might argue that the difference in each browser is not great, but it is a noticeable difference.
I would have thought that text rendering would be top priority from a UX perspective given that reading text constitutes such a major part of browsing the web.
Windows has had a weird font rendering subsystem transition since OpenType and some of the subpixel antialiasing and other stuff. You can flip a flag on the latest builds to try the Direct Type engine, and it looks a lot better.
I have a CRT monitor, and Windows 8 font rendering is overall TERRIBLE on it, as in, heavily aliased AND full of colour fringes.
So I installed MacType, only to find that Chrome has two ways to render fonts, and both are extremely wonky, I spent like 30 minutes tweaking MacType to my tastes, and then 3 hours re-tweaking it to make Chrome behave properly, it was a serious pain.
You can probably go through the cleartype calibration wizard to improve the font rendering, I'm basing that on the assumption that the out of the box settings are probably tuned to look good on generic lcd screens
I did, many, MANY times, also tried disabling it, and doing other things.
there are two issues: 1) Windows 8 assumes CRTs won't ever be used with it, and takes the liberty to do some LCD specific graphics stuff, that doesn't even work in LCDs that are organized differently (example: if the panel is "sideways" somehow).
2) the default system font of Windows 8 onwards is "Segoe", that renders poorly in CRTs, and even worse if you disable anti-aliasing of any kind.
1) Greatly better contrast, in fact it is what made me switch back to CRT (all my LCDs have extremely poor contrast, in some of them is impossible to watch "Game of Thrones" for example because in dark scenes you see just everything gray, except for the teeth of the actors).
2) Greatly better colours (LCD not only has colour shifting as you move around, it has less colours overall too).
3) Greatly faster response time. (even to do normal stuff, like using normal programs, with LCDs I misclick a lot).
4) I can use whatever resolution I want... I can play old games in low resolution can play new games in high resolution, can play widescreen games letterboxed or stretched, can play GPU-intensive games in low resolution to make them faster without losing quality due to upscaling, etc...
5) It feels much easier on my eyes for some reason, I am not sure what.
I worked with a CRT monitor for a while (design job at a non-profit; I had 2 CRTs and a several year old Mac Pro—it held up very well though) and it was actually quite nice.
- Non-16:9 aspect ratio. Photoshop is much nicer on 1600x1200 (relatively common CRT resolution) than on 1920x1080. CRTs are frequently 16:10 or even 4:3, so if I had a particularly nice one I'd be hesitant to replace it (4:3 LCD or LED are really hard to find).
- Higher refresh rate. 60Hz is nice enough, but 96Hz or higher is very pleasant. CRTs have a higher refresh rate than LCDs due to how they work (and if they didn't, you'd get quite a headache because there's no backlight).
High-end LCD screens have more or less caught up by now, but it took them a long time and they're still expensive (granted, high-end CRTs are at least as expensive now, but if you've had one for a while there's no real rush to replace it).
In my case I got it for free when someone was throwing it out, it looks good, it's big enough and 1600x1200, has the expected very low response time, and it's not really that heavy, so I really have no incentive to pay to replace it. In addition I like the anachronistic aesthetic and degaussing is nice.
I would have thought that text rendering would be top priority from a UX perspective given that reading text constitutes such a major part of browsing the web.
The problem, as demonstrated by your example and the replies it's generated, is that people have different preferences on text rendering.
Of your 3 samples I think IE is the best and Chrome's is the worst, with FF inbetween. More precisely, I'd be OK with reading text rendered the first way indefinitely (although I'd want to change it), the second one I could probably stand for a few minutes, and the last one I'd want to stop looking at as quickly as possible, because of how blurry it looks.
I think that the IE11 one, of those, is best. I would have said that Firefox's rendering matched it but it's doing that broken kind of anti-aliasing which adds colour fringing.
Here is a screenshot of some text from the Google Play store rendered in IE, Firefox and Chrome. Click the image to see it in its full size:
http://imgur.com/yYKSNBB
Firefox looks the best to me; Chrome the worst. IE is not great either, but it is better at larger font sizes than Chrome (IMO).
You might argue that the difference in each browser is not great, but it is a noticeable difference.
I would have thought that text rendering would be top priority from a UX perspective given that reading text constitutes such a major part of browsing the web.