These two fonts for the Web were produced by the good folks at Microsoft a few years ago. Both were designed by Matthew Carter – the intention being to create beautiful alternatives to the hegemony of Web fonts — Arial and Times New Roman. Smart.
Now it appears that Microsoft, in releasing a new browser (5.2 for Mac, has used a Tasman rendering engine and OS X’s new Quartz technology to round out both “newer” fonts. SOO, Verdana looks, to me, like Arial on my monitor. And Georgia looks, to me, like Times New Roman.
Believe me, this is nothing with nothing. But designing text and reading text on the Web sure has become slightly more dull. You can *turn off* Quartz text smoothing in the preferences panel of IE. But I wonder what Mr. Carter thinks about all this.