jQuery fadeIn/fadeOut IE cleartype glitch

While using the jQuery  javascript library today at work, I noticed a glitch under IE7. When fading a html node with the .fadeIn() and .fadeOut() functions in jQuery, IE drops the windows Cleartype rendering; which results in very ugly text. This problem appears to be very common, but no one has a nice solution for the problem.

The most common way to solve this problem is by removing the filter CSS attribute. In normal javascript, it would look like this:

document.getElementById('node').style.removeAttribute('filter');

and in jQuery, it would look like this:

$('#node').fadeOut('slow', function() {
   this.style.removeAttribute('filter');
});

This means that every single time we want to fade an element, we need to remove the filter attribute, which makes our code look messy.

A simple, more elegant solution would be to wrap the .fadeIn() and .fadeOut() functions with a custom function via the plugin interface of jQuery. The code would be exactly the same, but instead of directly calling the fade functions, we call the wrapper. Like so:

$('#node').customFadeOut('slow', function() {
   //no more fiddling with attributes here
});

So, how do you get this working? Just include the following code after you include the jQuery library for the added functionality.

(function($) {
	$.fn.customFadeIn = function(speed, callback) {
		$(this).fadeIn(speed, function() {
			if(jQuery.browser.msie)
				$(this).get(0).style.removeAttribute('filter');
			if(callback != undefined)
				callback();
		});
	};
	$.fn.customFadeOut = function(speed, callback) {
		$(this).fadeOut(speed, function() {
			if(jQuery.browser.msie)
				$(this).get(0).style.removeAttribute('filter');
			if(callback != undefined)
				callback();
		});
	};
})(jQuery);

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I have been informed by Steve Reynolds that the US Whitehouse Website is using some of the JS documented on this blog post. I would just like to say thanks to everyone who contributed in the comments. :)