A: 

Transforms in Safari are hardware-accelerated. It allows for much better speed, but the rendering doesn't follow the same pipeline, and some quality is lost. There's nothing you can do about it, except not use transforms. :/

zneak  2010-08-03 20:57:08
Well, crap. That was the one answer I _didn't_ want to hear. :-) Is there anywhere else I can follow up on this for more info? I can't find squat on Google. Thanks.
Rob Wilkerson  2010-08-04 11:53:18
@Rob Wilkerson: I'll try to search again. I remember animating a png, and during the animation its quality would be lowered, and that was because of the hardware acceleration. I don't remember where I found the info though.
zneak  2010-08-04 15:12:53
In this case, it's not _during_ the animation. Just having those styles active--even when no transformations are active--degrades the quality.
Rob Wilkerson  2010-08-04 18:24:01
I just got confirmation of this from an Apple employee in their dev forums--https://devforums.apple.com/message/271429#271429.
Rob Wilkerson  2010-08-04 21:09:29
+1  A: 

I think this is actually possible to fix in later iOS revisions (I believe 3.2 & 4.0) by using -webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased. Note: The aliasing will still be different, but will look less awkward if it's animated.

David Kaneda  2010-08-07 18:59:29
Is it iOS-specific or will it help me on non-mobile OSes?
Rob Wilkerson  2010-08-08 18:21:31
Definitely works in Safari 5- I believe latest Chrome, too.
David Kaneda  2010-08-08 22:29:46

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