So, one font doesn't render quite right at a certain size in a certain browser? Not sure I'd call that a disaster.
"I don’t have a clue how they expect to make money from this or why they wanted to create the directory in the first place"
I'll tell you why: To encourage the use of plain text instead of images. Every time a webmaster uses Google's font directory instead of resorting to an image file, Google's job gets easier.
It also puts a Google resource hit on lots of pages -- Google gives you fonts, you give it usage data.
Edit: This is probably not useful to them, actually, due to caching. However, it is their prerogative at any time to change their resource behavior and start receiving every request.
Man this argument gets really old, particularly when you have to use some old crappy expensive analytics tool because "we don't want to give Google our data", or when corporate IT doesn't allow you to use Google docs (it's the same argument). Just cranky.
Disaster is probably too strong word, but given current browser and operating system share Google's new fonts are much less useful than they appear to be.
Despite what it may look like according to most vocal people on the web, great majority of people still use Windows.
New Google fonts look noticeably worse than default fonts on all browsers in Windows XP/Vista/7.
Well rendered old fonts are still much nicer than ugly rendered new fonts.
Which means if you will use these new Google fonts, user experience for majority of your visitors is going to be worse than before (unless your visitors are heavily skewed toward OSX or Linux).
it's not one font. It's all of them under windows. Google does something to the fonts so that the Windows font rendering system isn't able to properly anti-alias them any more.
I can see the benefit Google gains from increased usage of plain text - but I can't see how this can be a main driver for their decision to launch this platform.
The web is progressing towards native support of @font-face. This is an intermediate step that will get us there - and, imo, it's also a way that Google could potentially experiment with selling font IP as a service. I say this largely because it would possibly dovetail with their efforts to sell IP via their recently announced app-store.
I don't think many websites display their text solely using images (without use of image replacement techniques) - though maybe I'm wrong?
Even non-decent front-end developers have an incentive to use IR; largely because Google's desire to index corresponds with most site owner's desire to be found.
There could be other motivations. One more sinister is that they use it to track even more visitors, one more altruistic is that they just do it to improve the web.
How about just getting bonus points from developers? That's a strong motivation, I do heaps of stuff to just get some extra bonus points from my wife, same principle. Neither sinister nor altruistic, just plain old what's-best-for-google.
And the way they aligned themselves with the web, what's-best-for-google tends to regularly be good for us too, although not always.
This article is a waste of time, imho. All it says is "this one font looks bad on my (not specified) system, in my (not specified) browser." It compares three completely different fonts - one of which is professionally crafted, whereas the other two are "hobbyist" works.
The rendering quality of his test cases has nothing to do with the method these fonts were embedded.
Anyway, Windows XP is the biggest source for this kind of problems, as you can see in this chart:
That's a good point. I'm using Win XP and the font gets rendered the same way on both Chrome 5 and FF 3.6.3
I can't see how you're going to blame this whole issue on Windows, when other fonts in the same operating system get rendered much better in smaller sizes.
Many of the Windows fonts have some special "Font Hinting" built in, which specifies how to exactly render the font in small sizes. This is important for systems, where there is no automatic Anti Aliasing in place.
Creating such a Font Hinting is, from my understanding, quite a tedious task and became unnecessary for newer systems. Most fonts that don't come along with Windows, simply don't have this hinting built in anymore.
Actually, it's not rendered smoothly at all - when you take a look at the smallest size on google's site, this is what you see:
http://twitpic.com/1pd6id
edit: This seems to only be an issue with the way Windows renders fonts. The fonts look awesome in Ubuntu or Mac systems
The Mac appears to always be fine. Here's a screenshot of it across Chrome 6.0.401.0, Safari 4.0.5, and Firefox 3.5.7 on Mac OS X 10.6.3: http://cl.ly/0c25eafae046c1be74bb
The issue is ClearType - turn it off, refresh your browser and it will render properly. Something somewhere needs fixing up obviously but it doesn't look to be with the engine Google is using to put the font on the page.
Due to the readability troubles custom fonts can cause, I have them disabled in Firefox with about:config's gfx.downloadable_fonts.enabled setting set to false. Too often has the "stylish" choice sacrificed readability while aiming for a fashionable look.
"I don’t have a clue how they expect to make money from this or why they wanted to create the directory in the first place"
I'll tell you why: To encourage the use of plain text instead of images. Every time a webmaster uses Google's font directory instead of resorting to an image file, Google's job gets easier.