WebKit font smoothing in 2022 – What is the best approach?
I've been researching about it for a while, read lots of articles, forums and blogs and there are too many different opinions about it.
This blog post basically says that we should leave this setting to default (instead of "antialiased" or removing it altogether)
This post on the other hand, strongly suggests to remove it and suggests trying to find good enough font weight to make it readable.
On this Github issue, people are yelling to Google to make them removed antialiasing from fonts site.
It looks like -webkit-font-smoothing only effects MacOS users as far as I can read from the MDN documentation
Also I checked big fishes(Apple, Airbnb and so on) in the industry and most of them use font smoothing.
On the other hand, Figma uses its own font rendering and it has font-smoothing by default. This ends up to see different results on live compared to design. There are couple of tickets about it and the answer is "It is the current reality of the web that fonts render differently for everyone. There is nothing you can do about it. Yes, your font differs from Figma, but it would also be different for every user who visits your website."
which is not a good answer in my opinion. Whole point of designing things on a design tool is to simulate the result and they are basically failing at it and just dare to say "don't worry about it".
As you can see there are lots of controversial claims on that topic. So we decided to test removing -webkit-font-smoothing:antialiased
and we got significantly positive results compared to keeping it which is pretty interesting. How would you read that result? As designers of 2022, how we should approach this topic?