John Gruber linked to an article about the text-rendering:optimizeLegibility CSS property today and as he said, news to me. I’ve built a quick Safari extension to enable it by default in Safari (Firefox already does this). So, without further ado:
Optimize Legibility is a simple Safari extension that injects a single CSS attribute (text-rendering:optimizeLegibility) into every page. This will improve kerning and ligatures in text.
Download it or view the (trivial) source at Github.
Update: 1.0.2 adds an icon and reverts the CSS to matching body rather than wildcard. Should improve performance (although it won’t be noticeably faster on any modern machine).
Apparently this feature isn’t default because of performance issues. The wildcard selector you’re using is also criticized for the same reason… Perhaps a less hardcore solution would be to target headings only?
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If you use this and are a web developer, remember that others will not see things the way you do unless you add the CSS attribute to your project!
I’ve made a similar extension to this for Chrome. Hopefully any web developers and/or designers who come across the excellent Safari extension listed above would be interested in using it as well.
http://github.com/johnmichel/Optimize-Legibility-for-Chrome
I did get the update via auto-update in extension settings, but the icon in the list was not updated to the new one till I de-install and re-installed the extension. This is curious.