Sorry, I don't know the answer on OSX. But I do know that on Windows, Chrome still does not include DirectWrite support, so font render much worse than in Firefox. But hey, it's only been about four years since DirectWrite became available.<p>This is one of the chief reasons I've never been a Chrome user. The font rendering is bad. It doesn't use a subpixel letter positioning algorithm and the kerning is just plain poor.<p>See <a href="http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=25541" rel="nofollow">http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=25541</a>
Chrome/Safari support subpixel rendering, using OS X's font renderer. Subpixel rendering works well for black on white but looks awful in reverse<p>See:
<a href="http://www.usabilitypost.com/2012/11/05/stop-fixing-font-smoothing/" rel="nofollow">http://www.usabilitypost.com/2012/11/05/stop-fixing-font-smo...</a>
It's because Firefox implements it's own text-rendering engine. I don't know if chrome uses the OS API for text-rendering or has it's own text-rendering engine too.