Well, I realised what was bugging me and why I prefer the iOS implementation for now -- the tighter underline, both a pixel closer to the baseline and a hair closer to each descender, helps ensure the underline feels continuous even when it's broken this way. I do prefer this approach for headlines or animated effects, but perhaps (as was suggested elsewhere) changing the underline colour and/or tightening the spacing would help. A neat implementation though. Seeing links here, it's true, the "g"s just seem to get demolished by the underline. I wonder, if I linked to qithub.com, would you see the difference? ;-)

Oh and if there's a way to apply this without requiring a background color, I suspect this might be a popular add-on or browser setting for some folks.