On the Homepage for Google, there is now a link to the new Nexus S Android phone. The device runs on a 1Ghz Cortex A8 processor with 16GB iNAND flash memory built in. Wi-fi N is now included, along with the older B and G versions, and the operating system is the new Android 2.3 (Gingerbread) flavour.

As good as the phone looks, the most surprising thing that I noticed was that the website looks shocking in Internet Explorer 8. Take a look at the screenshots below:

Firefox homepage

IE homepage

The image below shows a comparison of the gingerbread icon in different browsers:

As you can see the images have a really nasty effect around them, and the text is poorly rendered. If you click through to the information pages, the text looks so bad that it's almost unreadable.

The reason for the degraded text is that Google decided to use the Google Web Font Loader in an attempt to make the fonts look prettier. In doing so, they have managed to make the site look terrible in the most popular browser on the market. This font corruption also affects most other versions of IE (5.5,6,7,8) but looks ok in IE9 beta (well, thats 0.2% of the IE-using market happy then).

Maybe google did it on purpose, or maybe this is another 'Epic Fail' in the push to live race (anyone remember the Google's Background Image faux pas?) Whatever the reason, it doesnt reflect well on either the nexus S webteam, or the google webfont loader project.