I haven't check georgia in IE, but I do know that for all the money and initiative MS spend on typography, they sure didn't invest enough in anti-aliasing......

Amen to that innovati.

I guess that's the viewers punishment for using an inferior browser.

Jeremiah,

which operating system are you using? Are you using no antialiasing, standard antialiasing or ClearType?

Adam

IE 7 is Windows only. Maybe post a screen grab and we can take a look.

Cheers, Si

Hi, thanks for such quick response. I use a Mac with Leopard. My other machine is a pc with XP using clear type. Here is a side by side comparison.

It almost appears to be a different weight as well as skewed horizontal?

The first image doesn't use subpixel rendering, the second does. As a OS X user you should be used to this kind of rendering. I don't unterstand why you consider it "slaughtered".
The different weights might be a problem in your CSS declarations for the headlines. Hard to tell without seeing the code.
IE screenshot regular/bold:

You may want to check out
http://www.microsoft.com/typography/cleartype/tuner/Step1.aspx

A.

If you don't want IE7 to use ClearType at all, you need to go to Tools|Internet Options|Advanced and uncheck the "Always use ClearType for HTML" box. Otherwise, IE7 will use ClearType for HTML content (but not the browser UI elements) even if you have ClearType turned off in your display properties.

Thanks everyone for the posts. Ralf, there is only one css declaration for the header and no
"ie specific" declarations. As you can tell the font on the IE rendering has to drop down a line while in the firefox rendering does not. This just seems like a drastic change when 2 browsers render the same font.

Ralf, there is only one css declaration for the header and no “ie specific” declarations.

Sure, but you may have heard, that browsers handle HTML and CSS declarations differently, haven't you?
Check your CSS! It seems to trigger the bold style in IE, but of course you can overwrite this standard behaviour, even in IE.

Hey Ralf, just got to thinking. I know different browsers interpret attributes differently. There is no weight attribute in my stylesheet so I dont see why IE is interpreting it as bold as opposed to firefox as regular. That is why i thought the font was "slaughtered" because it renders in a entirely different weight. I'm not sure if this is appropriate to post in this forum, sorry if it is.

haha, just figured it out guys sorry for the confusion. the <.h1.> attribute automatically carries a bold weight in IE7. Sorry for all the fuss.

Like I said: Bold Headlines are a standard bevaviour: http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/HTML3.2/5.26.html
Usually overwritten with something like font-weight:normal;

*whimper* Microsoft and their half-hearted attempt at compliance or parity with their competitors leaves me as a designer heartbroken, lonely and sad.

Microsoft in my opinion doesn't hit a lot of the targets even they set for themselves, which seems like poor-performance, even by their own measures, and using competitive measures they are behind the market, while also being the most costly, and also the most used.

How does this happen?

I wish that you could design websites with the same power and flexibility of PDFs (easily embedded fonts, dynamic, portable). I don't mean using flash either. I mean an entirely self-contained dynamic document format, and let RIA's use code and live out of the browser like Adobe AIR is trying.

I think the web and the web applications need to separate ways, to both leave the browser and allow the designer/developer to have the utmost control, and not rely on another person's shoddy implementation of what 'ought to be'

My only recommendation for you is, if you wish to maintain the highest order of parity between your site out of Internet Explorer and in IE, you need to manually account for the differences using a seperate IE-only CSS file, and only load that upon browser check.

Thanks a lot Microsoft!

Wah! toys-out-the-pram!

As I recall H1 has defaulted to bold since Mosaic v 1.

Thanks a lot Marc Andreessen! ;-)

Tom, consider yourself officially clueless.

hhp