3 ms·

Unpopular opinion: Arial is fine.

NikolaNovak 4y ago
I think I could happily live with say half a dozen fonts on the web (plus variations of bold/italic, if we want to count those as multipliers) for the rest of my life. Sarif, SansSarif, Mono, Weird - that's really my ability or care to tell fonts apart, when I'm there for the interesting article or funny video. But it's that tension: I, as a consumer, am happy with simplicity They, as producers, want branding and differentiation (not to mention tracking and all sorts of other things) Ultimately, and we mustn't forget this, they the producers are the ones investing effort they need a return on; and we the consumers are lousy when it comes to voting with our feet, dollars, scrolling thumbs and back buttons.
- jerf 4y ago
  We're talking about system fonts here, not webfonts, so they can differentiate as much as they like with webfonts. Webfonts would still be available. Although they'd also have to go into the per-site cache to prevent sites from fingerprinting by whether or not you already had the font loaded via some other site. (Web fonts can be quite space-effective, if the site can serve a trimmed-down version that doesn't have the whole unicode space in them. CSS even has support for breaking the font into pieces so if a bit of unicode does slip through on some page you can still go get "the rest" of the font.)
  - lelandfe 4y ago
    > support for breaking the font into pieces And in the future, Incremental Font Transfer will make this even easier: https://www.w3.org/TR/IFT/ https://www.w3.org/TR/IFT/
d2wa 4y ago
Arial Nova, not installed by default, is better. Free download in the Microsoft Store. Like Helvetica Neue, it’s slightly more readable by increasing the size of some punctuation marks, lengthening horizontal strokes (e.g. t), and greatly improving kerning.
justsomehnguy 4y ago
I never had a problem reading a text on a web-page in the default fonts. Web-pages with some ultra-uber-kewl-modern font? Yep, I had.
weberer 4y ago
Arial fails the Il test. If you can't tell the difference between these two characters, then the font sucks.

I think I could happily live with say half a dozen fonts on the web (plus variations of bold/italic, if we want to count those as multipliers) for the rest of my life. Sarif, SansSarif, Mono, Weird - that's really my ability or care to tell fonts apart, when I'm there for the interesting article or funny video. But it's that tension: I, as a consumer, am happy with simplicity They, as producers, want branding and differentiation (not to mention tracking and all sorts of other things) Ultimately, and we mustn't forget this, they the producers are the ones investing effort they need a return on; and we the consumers are lousy when it comes to voting with our feet, dollars, scrolling thumbs and back buttons.

jerf 4y ago
We're talking about system fonts here, not webfonts, so they can differentiate as much as they like with webfonts. Webfonts would still be available. Although they'd also have to go into the per-site cache to prevent sites from fingerprinting by whether or not you already had the font loaded via some other site. (Web fonts can be quite space-effective, if the site can serve a trimmed-down version that doesn't have the whole unicode space in them. CSS even has support for breaking the font into pieces so if a bit of unicode does slip through on some page you can still go get "the rest" of the font.)
- lelandfe 4y ago
  > support for breaking the font into pieces And in the future, Incremental Font Transfer will make this even easier: https://www.w3.org/TR/IFT/ https://www.w3.org/TR/IFT/

d2wa 4y ago

Arial Nova, not installed by default, is better. Free download in the Microsoft Store. Like Helvetica Neue, it’s slightly more readable by increasing the size of some punctuation marks, lengthening horizontal strokes (e.g. t), and greatly improving kerning.

justsomehnguy 4y ago

I never had a problem reading a text on a web-page in the default fonts. Web-pages with some ultra-uber-kewl-modern font? Yep, I had.

weberer 4y ago

Arial fails the Il test. If you can't tell the difference between these two characters, then the font sucks.