When I was forced onto a PC this morning, under great duress, I tried to reassure myself with simple thoughts—PC user thoughts. Here was the latest and greatest Microsoft® Windows®, I told myself, the recipient of awards and accolades from the entire PC world, the perfectest operating system ever. How bad could it be?

Then I opened a browser.

Feeling faint, I leaned in for a closer look, and choked back vomit at the horror: Windows 7 renders CJK (Chinese, Japanese, and Korean) with bitmap glyphs. Not even inline rōmaji (Latin) text is spared the bitmap treatment.

On top of that we have Windows’ apparent inability to adhere to a full-width character grid. This is most obvious at lower left, where a column of prices teeters askelter as if struck by a chair hurled by a monkey in a furious rage.

Here, for comparison, are the same pages rendered on a system designed not by clueless trogs, but by expert developers who respect the art of typography:

Now, everyone knows that Microsoft is slow to adopt new technologies. But to render text with jaggies—worse, CJK text, the readability of which is improved tremendously by antialiasing—some 34 years after Apple invented subpixel rendering? Appalling even by Microsoft’s standards.

Assuming Windows 7 is even capable of rendering CJK decently on a fresh install, why does it remain halfway illegible in these everyday examples? Does Windows make you tweak the registry or find extra font packs just to lift its display typesetting to bare mediocrity?