for the article's author: try this before choosing a font, PLEASE: https://browserlab.adobe.com/ (yeah, it needs an adobe account that you can make in 2min, with no cc, but it's free if you don't exceed a daily usage quota)

...not everybody is using safari on a mac (and I eagerly await the days when people will start using fonts that are only readable on safari on a mac with retina display...)

I actually checked it in Xombrero on OpenBSD with no issue. To be honest, I hadn't expected anyone to read the article outside of people in the IRC channel, where practically no one is running Windows.

Yet another case of chrome's bad rendering.

The font used: http://www.google.com/webfonts/specimen/IM+Fell+English

Why would anyone try and use bad typewriter font imitation on a website is beyond me.

Erm. It seems like the problem is not with Chrome's rendering but with the site owner's font selection.

It's not just Chrome.

I get just as awful a rendering on Firefox ESR 10.0.5 on Win7-64.

Chrome renders fonts differently than other browsers in Windows 7. Possibly for speed reasons? Both the latest FF and IE9 look decent.

It's more historical at this point. Chrome doesn't use DirectWrite because it uses Skia on Windows. At the time, the choice was between GDI+ and Skia, and Skia was much faster. But DirectWrite on Vista and 7 is extremely fast (it's GPU-accelerated, unlike the Skia backend Chrome uses).

Looks fine in my win7/FF16 arrangement

It's his font choice. I don't agree with it either, but at least it's intentional.

Edit: Perhaps not. The font looks better on the link provided in the sibling comment.

Yep, seems to be having trouble on Chrome stable too.