Default fonts in Firefox

[Matthew Paul Thomas]

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On 26 Sep, 2005, at 5:04 PM, Shot - Piotr Szotkowski wrote:
> ...
> Ian Jackson:
>>
>>  * Use sans-serif fonts, rather than serif fonts, when the
>>    website doesn't specify.
>
> It's more important 'which fonts'. Verdana and Georgia were designed
> for the screen and are great at this - so these are always set as my
> defaults. As msttcorefonts is not in Ubuntu main, I guess both Verdana
> and Georgia are out of the question; if you believe that the web pages
> look better in whatever sans-serif font Ubuntu ships then I say go for
> it.

I don't see what's wrong with Vera Serif, myself. It's almost as good 
as Georgia.

>>  * Set minimum font size to 11 (one less than the default size of 12).
> ...
> The default of 12px is widely accepted across different browsers and
> operating systems,

The default proportional font size for Mozilla, Firefox, Internet 
Explorer, Opera, and Safari is 16px. For Mozilla, Internet Explorer, 
and (I think) Opera, that has been true since 1999; for Firefox and 
Safari, it has been true since their respective 1.0 versions. If you 
think the default is 12px, maybe you have a profile migrated from 
Netscape 4, which defaulted to 12px. Or maybe you're confused by 
Epiphany and Konqueror, both of which default to 12*pt*, which equals 
16px at current (~96dpi) resolutions.

> and it would really be a headache for web developers if the most 
> popular Linux distro broke this in its default browser.

Indeed. The Safari developers experimented with a 14px sans-serif 
default font initially, but before 1.0 they were convinced to change to 
16px serif like the more popular browsers.

> I also doubt this would benefit the readers. Quite a lot of web pages
> define their font sizes relatively to the default of 12px

(or rather, to the default of 16px)

> , and making them effectively render with a smaller

(or thanks to the minimum size, larger)

> font on the default setup might do in fact more harm/inconvenience 
> than good to Ubuntu users.
> ...

I just surveyed the front pages of the world's 100 most popular Web 
sites as defined by Alexa 
<http://www.alexa.com/site/ds/top_sites?ts_mode=global&lang=none>, 
using Ubuntu Firefox with a minimum font size of 11px. I noticed layout 
problems on 20 of the 100 pages, though 17 of these cases were just 
unexpected line wrapping (orphan kanji or words) from lines ending up 
longer than the designer expected, and only one page had unreadable 
text. The messy pages were:
http://www.yahoo.co.jp/
http://www.sina.com.cn/
http://www.qq.com/
http://www.nate.com/
http://www.bbc.co.uk/
http://www.daum.net/
http://www.tom.com/
http://www.rakuten.co.jp/
http://www.chinaren.com/
http://www.livedoor.com/
http://www.china.com/
http://www.31cn.com/
http://www.ebay.com.cn/
http://www.infoseek.co.jp/
http://www.goo.ne.jp/
http://www.pchome.com.tw/
http://www.pconline.com.cn/
http://www.hc360.com/
http://www.hinet.net/
http://www.cmfu.com/

The survey was unfair in three main ways. First, I looked only at the 
front page of each site, not at any other pages. Second, several of the 
sites in the top 100 were ad banner providers, not sites that anyone 
actually visits. And third, the "long tail" of non-portal sites are 
likely to be much less dependent on particular font sizes, to cram 
things into horizontal and vertical spaces, than portal sites are.

Cheers
- -- 
Matthew Paul Thomas
http://mpt.net.nz/
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