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Comment by Zev | Hacker News Reader

My biggest problem with Arial is:

  font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;

Most (something like 99%?) of computers come with Arial. So, even the ones that have Helvetica installed as well, will get Arial, since its listed first. It seems like a waste to even list it in that order.

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You could try:

  font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, sans-serif;

Helvetica has some weird anti-aliasing issues on Windows PCs (don’t know which versions exactly) so you shouldn’t use it there anyway. Pretty much everyone using a Mac has both Helvetica and Helvetica Neue, so it’s no problem using Neue there.

Well, when I'm writing CSS, I do that. But, thats not the case for a very large majority of the sites out there online. So, I'm wondering if there's any actual reason behind Arial, rather then Helvetica being first (besides the obvious "more computers have it").

No reason, I guess. It doesn’t make any sense and you shouldn’t use that font stack.

In Dreamweaver the font stacks all have Arial in front of Helvetica. So there's another reason to dislike Dreamweaver.

For all those font elitists who disliked Arial so much they removed it from their computers.

Please don't ever do this. You are choosing a font that has known (major) anti-aliasing issues in Windows just to satisfy a small proportion of mac users. This is becoming increasingly commonplace and I don't think designers understand just how bad it looks on Windows.

Helvetica and Helvetica Neue are different font families. And, AFAIK, Windows only ships with Helvetica, not Helvetica Neue.

And I don't really consider myself a designer (at least, not a web designer), but, you're right that I didn't realize that Windows had problems displaying Helvetica.

Helvetica Neue is still available on Windows, and is very common in the design and development industry as I seem to recall a free version doing the rounds. In fact we had it for a year before we even got the official Helvetica family pack. It's not just ugly, but unreadable to a degree in Firefox.

Back when this was happening, was it on Windows XP by any chance? Because ClearType isn't enabled by default on XP (although it is on Vista and 7). ClearType makes a huge difference in how fonts look on Windows.

I wouldn't say a hugely positive difference. I like my fonts crisp, not hungover.

http://www.codestyle.org/css/font-family/sampler-WindowsResu...

About 2 percent have Helvetica Neue installed. Not enough for me to care about them. Your mileage may vary.

Windows doesn’t come with Helvetica Neue. (And if designers don’t test their stuff on Windows they just suck.)

Thanks, I wasn't aware of this.

If you're wondering, here's what Helvetica can look like in Windows:

http://www.nivas.hr/pub/blog-images-aa/non-aa-1.gif

It's bad enough that Microsoft ripped off Helvetica, making it look crappy on the web is downright mean ;)

Helvetica's line-height is different (or is otherwise rendered differently, vertically-speaking), so I select Arial first to keep the look consistent.

could you try:

font-family: Helvetica,"MS sans-serif", Arial, sans-serif;

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