[Go Make Things] Web-safe fonts don't exist

Tuesday, July 30, 2024

For as long as I've been a web developer, I've heard that using "web-safe fonts," fonts that are preinstalled on every operating system already, is faster and more resilient than using custom web fonts.

And for a while, this was true!

But as Oliver Schöndorfer from Pimp My Type explains, that's no longer the case, because of mobile browsers…

While this was true 15 years ago, when you would find Arial, Times New Roman, Georgia or Verdana on Windows and Apple machines, this drastically changed with the mobile era.

While iOS kept the most common ones, Android ditched all of them, using their own fonts. You can find on good old fontfamiliy.io, what will be the replacement for these defaults. And since Android globally is the most popular operating system with 43% (source), this matter a lot.

For Android, there are no documented font names. It falls back to the default sans-serif (Roboto) or serif (Noto Serif).

I have periodically considered switching my site to web-safe fonts, but it's always looked wildly different from one device to another, causing me to quickly abandon the idea.

Oliver talks through the various implications in more detail in his full article here.

Cheers,
Chris

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