New Windows version Chrome should display text better

Google has released a new version of its Chrome browser, which includes a new text rendering engine on Windows. Also, 30 security vulnerabilities in the web browser have been fixed.

The new render engine for Windows users uses DirectWrite, an api that has been around since Windows Vista but which Google Chrome has not yet made use of. Among other things, DirectWrite offers better anti-aliasing and is more modern than GDI, a set of APIs that has been present since the first Windows versions. Google says it has had to rebuild the font rendering engine from scratch to support DirectWrite.

DirectWrite has been used in Internet Explorer for some time. Firefox also uses DirectWrite, although this does not happen with some fonts, because text can look unclear in some cases according to users. Also in Chrome, some fonts, including the widely used Arial, seem to be rendered less clearly.

Chrome 37 also includes a new interface for saving passwords. Fifty security vulnerabilities were also squashed, including two serious ones that allowed an attacker to break out of the sandbox and take control of the user’s computer. The researcher who found the leaks received 30,000 dollars from Google as a reward, almost 23,000 euros.

An animation with the old and new way of rendering text