I noticed this woo theme for example has it set on the HTML tag and therefore the whole site's text has it set. I read that it can cause performance problems but that was a while ago. Some people suggested only adding it to headers and big text.
Have the rules changed now? Do browsers perform well with it?
from the MDN text-rendering page, last updated on 18:27, 29 Apr 2012, it reads:
which tels us that it is not defined in any CSS standard, thus leading to cross-browser issues, as seen on the Browser compatibility table.
By default
So, is safe to assume that the best option is to let the browser take care of details like this, since this feature is not a standard (yet), and most browsers don't support it.