Which side needs fixing? IE looks better for headlines (lots of pixels to play with) but with normal type it is far worse. This all started around mid-2000s when the WPF team decided subpixel accuracy was more important than clarity, and it's spread to other teams since. Chrome's decent font rendering, using ClearType like the OS specifies, is one of the reasons I still use it and can't stand IE.

Maybe if high-DPI mode worked and laptops had high res screens it'd be better, but that's not the case for a while.

I thought the same. I've been mostly using Linux for the past month and now that I switched back to Windows (trying out windows 8) this is something that is really bugging me.

And it's not just the font aliasing. Some UTF-8 characters are not even rendered (only squares appear). There was one article I saw here (I think it was about lambda calculus) that I had to read on IE.

Maybe its time to go back to firefox on windows.