This afternoon, I helped Mum out with a problem she was having in Internet Explorer 7. While Mum was checking over her latest blog post, she noticed all the apostrophes in her posts were looking like they were coloured blue. I had installed Internet Explorer 7 on Mum's computer on yesterday and she really liked it, but she told me that, apart from the apostrophes being a blue colour, she has also noticed the font on most sites appeared blurry. Having a visual impairment, I had never noticed it and, being that I'm mainly a Mozilla Firefox user and rarely go into IE 7 apart from when I need to, it's never been a problem for me.
After comparing the differences on both of our computers using IE7 (they looked the same, but when you zoom anywhere above 100%, the apostrophes looked like normal black, but when we put it back to 100%, it looked blue. I figured it was the blurry font Mum was on about, so I did a Google search on "Blurry text in Internet Explorer 7" and it showed me a link to a Microsoft Support page explaining what to do. I followed the instructions on my own computer and Mum's computer and when I restarted IE 7, Mum didn't have the blue apostrophes any more and web fonts were no longer blurry. A huge thanks to Google for making it sooooo easy to solve problems!!!!
Anyway, in case you're interested, I've noted the fix below. Apparently, it's all because of ClearType technology. I don't exactly know what it is, but all I know is that it makes text on LCD screens look much more smoother with no jagged edges (well, it's supposed to do that).
In Internet Explorer 7, click on the Tools menu (if the menu bar is hidden, there should be a Tools option with an arrow beside it under the Search box)
- Click on Internet Options,
- Click on the Advanced tab,
- Under Multimedia (in the section that allows you to check/uncheck options), uncheck the option marked Always Use ClearType for HTML,
- Click OK, that won't change anything yet,
- Close and restart Internet Explorer 7. You should notice a BIG difference!
I do hope you find this information handy, it really helped me and Mum out! Don't you just hate it when you come across an annoying problem with computers? I'm sure most people do.
