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Adopting Arial is at the intersection of several classes of bad web font choices:

  - random, because it ended up being the browser's default sans serif;
  - someone not really interested in typography went through their available fonts, i.e. system fonts and a few random ones, in alphabetical order and "A" offered enough choices for them;
  - "Arial" is a short simple word, and someone was too lazy to check or remember other font names;
  - an amateur designer made a pathetic attempt to reproduce totally inappropriate "Swiss" design, badly, or to be even more inappropriately ironic;
  - "overused" and therefore "fatal to the designer's credibility", in the euphemistic words of the linked article; a designer that doesn't realize that fonts can be overused has less familiarity with typography than the general public and is therefore not a designer.

Oh, I agree. It is all what you say it is. I would add boring and bland.

Still more legible than the weird-ass Baskerville-geometric chimaera of a website I have open in another tab (which I won't name since I do like the guy).

I am okay with people choosing whatever font they like, it's their content and their artistic freedom to do so. You HAVE to download their font to the same extent you have to download their images and CSS.

There's always reading mode for when their choices aren't compatible with a given configuration.

Having said that, I haven't come across many if any sites that don't render well because of poor font choices.

> Please do use Arial. I find it better than about 95% of the choices done by "people that care about typography".

It may be better than 95% of the choices done by people who try to differentiate by picking a non-default font for the sake of picking a non-default font, which is certainly worse than just keeping the default, but I doubt very much that it is better than even 5% of the choices made by people who care about typography.

I am not so sure. Most of the self proclaimed typographers I have met seem to be the kind that spends ages selecting fonts and redesigning their blog or sites without producing any actual content and then whining on people that has content people actually wants to read. Not only is there no content, the little that is available is almost baroque.

I feel sorry for the people who do know what they are talking about because of the people they have to share community with.

Edit:

I come of as something of a prick. I know. In reality I don't really care. I just find that so much time spent making my web experience worse, and it is provoking. Most of what I read is PDFs (preferably printed) typeset using latex in computer modern, and I like it that way.