Priorities

Recently we saw two reports about bugs in the Chrome browser on Windows.

One bug was about font rendering. It turns out that fonts on Chrome looked bad because Google neglected to update Chrome so that it would take advantage of the new font rendering technology provided by Windows.
Importantly, both Internet Explorer and Firefox had been using this technology for ages, and Chrome was the only major browser that was still using the old, outdated font rendering API.

The other bug is related to battery consumption. Apparently Chrome fails to throttle down its power consumption even when the browser is just running in the background. This bug can be traced back to 2010, which means that Google has knowingly neglected this bug for 4 years.

This eloquently tells us what Chrome’s priorities are not. Chrome does not prioritize beautiful font rendering and it doesn’t prioritize low power consumption.

Interestingly, this is in direct contrast with Apple. Apple prioritized typography and has very good font rendering. The quality of the fonts are also very high. In power consumption, Apple has emphasized this on their mobile devices, their laptops, their operating system, and even specifically on Safari for quite a while.