Hacker News Reader

i had never heard of this "trick" before today. why does this exist? i thought `font-family: sans` was meant to give you your OS or browser's default sans-serif font. why do something so elaborate?

View on HN

The default sans-serif font in Firefox for Mac is Helvetica, but the default font for macOS is San Francisco. If you want to have your page use a system-looking font, particularly if you're building an Electron app like Slack, you might want to get past the browser defaults and instead use the system defaults.

I used macOS fonts in my example, but this applies to every platform.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com