In my previous post, “Disabling ClearType in Reading Layout View,” I went off on a little rant about how applications don’t respect user’s preferences. After all, ClearType is actually a global setting, available from your Display Settings control panel applet, simply click on “Effects…” to get this:
See? If I wanted ClearType turned on, I’d do it in that menu. I don’t want your application to assume that “ClearType is King™” and turn it on regardless. Now, I’ll admit that option may be a little buried for most users, but it’s there.
But now it seems that Word is not the only Microsoft application that turns on ClearType by default. The new Internet Explorer Beta 2 “preview” is doing the same thing. At least for IE7 the option to turn it off is in the GUI and not buried deep in the registry like with Word.
But now that’s two different applications that I’ll have to configure to turn it off if I want it off. It should just be a simple matter of turning on/off the global setting.
In an ideal world, Windows would detect if I connect an LCD monitor to it, and ask if I want to enable the global ClearType setting. That way, applications wouldn’t have to resort to these hacks to force it on by default for themselves.