Is there a way to get rid of cleartype/font smoothing in Internet Explorer 11?

Question

My eyes cannot tolerate either cleartype or font smoothing. When I got a new computer and moved up to Windows 7, Office 2010, and IE 9, I did a lot of research and took many steps to get rid of them both. Then I got an automatic update to IE 10 last year and couldn't find any way to create the pixelated type that my eyes can tolerate. So, I rolled back the updates until I reached IE 8 (I couldn't get IE 9 to work the way it had prior to the IE 10 update) and turned off automatic updates. My problem is that an increasing number of websites don't display properly in IE 8. I don't like Chrome--I really like the IE interface. Is there any viable option for me? Does IE 11 have an option to remove cleartype/font smoothing? Is there another browser with an interface more similar to IE?

I can tell from my research that lots of people can't tolerate cleartype/font smoothing. It's outrageous that Microsoft doesn't seem to care.

Answer 1

First answer so please go easy!

Unfortunately, there is no way to remove cleartype from specific applications (that I have come across) as cleartype appears to operate on a per-screen basis. This means that each monitor, can have a specific configuration for cleartype.

As a suggestion regarding alternate browsers; mozilla firefox is visually similar to IE, and performs the same basic function, and should interface properly with your system cleartype settings.

Additionally, IE 11 appears not to have specific cleartype settings, and so, will probably give you the same problem as IE 10.

Answer 2

Cleartype as such appears to have had mixed reviews. Some people love it, some loathe it, and people in both camps have expressed incredulity at how anyone could be in the other camp. There seem to have been some suggestions that it may work better on some hardware, especially laptops and newer screens. There have also been suggestions that IE from version 9 onwards hasn't used cleartype in the same sense that the rest of Windows uses it.

I can't find any option to disable cleartype in IE11. There was an option to do this in earlier versions of IE, but it seems to have gone. One workaround is to use accessibility to force IE11 to use a font that appears not to have smoothing problems, such as

• Batang
• Dotum
• Dotum Che
• Gulim
• MS PGothic
• MS PMincho.

Tools / Internet Options / General / Fonts allows you to set fonts.

Tools / Internet Options / General / Accessibility / Ignore font styles specified on web pages allows you to force IE to use the specified fonts for almost all text on web pages. (You are liable to lose the odd special character here and there doing this.)

Microsoft have switched to Edge instead of IE for Windows 10, but you may not like Windows 10 as it seems to have fewer user configurable options than earlier versions of Windows. There are plenty of other browsers around - Firefox for example, or Opera - but none of them are going to look exactly like IE.