maybe it's just me but with the current font the param font-weight: 600 is IMHO too bold compared to bold. Attached a screenshot to show the differences.. It's mainly Chrome and Firefox, IE 9 looks fine .. Haven't tested Opera yet..
Bold looks more decent, 600 is IMO too blurred..
How on earth did you get it to look like that with Firefox? Bold is 700 weight. 600 is less bold than that on Firefox, or at least every time I've seen it on Firefox. The whole reason I started using it was because it wasn't as heavy and had a bit of emphasis without looking over the top.
IE will also render it correctly, but Opera and Webkit don't recognise anything other than normal (400) or bold (700) so will fall back to bold if 600 is declared. Chrome's font rendering is pretty bad anyway, regardless of which weight you declare.
ETA: Aha. Idea. which font are you calling there? Are you on Doze with Segoe or on something else and falling back to a diferent font.
Of course I did check it on Browsershots a while back, with every browser/OS combo I could think of, and it seemed to be fine then.
Screeny is latest Chrome on XP, but it's exactly the same on Chrome W7.
Firefox is better now (I've updated to the latest version just now).
The issue seems to be Chrome & Windows specific..
Looks good here on Chrome 29 and W7.
Though the the font I see here looks very different from yours...but now that I look closer at the picture, the two screens (bold and 600) use two different fonts: the first seems an Arial (or something similarly simple), while the second seems a Segoe (or something similarly "complex" :P).
yep, your're right... it's indeed a different font. Interesting, 'cause I used the Chrome developer tools to switch directly from "600" to "bold"..
Bug in Chrome with a german Windows? As said, I can reproduce it on different computers..
These things can happen. Try to stay away from weights that might not be associated with a font file because the browser will then reproduce the weight from a 400 font. Sometimes a 700 font has less sub pixels than a 600 emulation would.
Also works on some other weights, of course...
No, what happens is that they fall back to a 700 weight, not 400. They don't try to emulate 600 at all, they just use 700 instead (referring specifically to how Webkit and Presto behave when 600 is declared).
If it's a problem there is an easy way around it. Simply declare 700 for Webkit and 600 for FF and IE.
Yep, that's a possible solution but isn't it better at all to simply change it to 700 (bold) for all browsers? IMO we should avoid browser specific "workarounds" as far as possible.
Better in what sense? It's a hell of a lot better looking at 600, for those browsers that will do it properly. That's why I chose it. :)