What is a good default font family for any IE8/9, Chrome & Firefox?

Question

I have users complaining that fonts are not clear on some browseres (especially displaying data in grids...I'm using Trebuchet MS per default of asp.netmvc3 css site styles)

Q: What is a good overall default font family size that displays with good resolution (easy on the eyes, easy to read, etc,)?

Any recommendations?

Answer 1

Some Useful Info

http://webdesign.about.com/od/fonts/a/aa080204.htm

http://speckyboy.com/2007/12/30/top-10-web-safe-blogging-fonts/

Answer 2

Arial is probably the best choice for a standard font that is available on almost every system. Use Georgia as a complementary serif font.

Note that Arial is a knock-off of Helvetica which is typically available to users of Apple products but may not be available to Windows users. I generally specify:

font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif;

Answer 3

Trebuchet MS is good for screens,

Times New Roman is for printing on paper.

Verdana is good for small texts, but Verdana trend is ending.

Courier New is good for programming codes, because it is monospace.

Trebuchet MS - Helvetica and Arial family is the current best, this is used in apple devices and people love it. do not use small fonts.

People are using hi-res screens more and more. Use large fonts wherever possible.

Switch the fonts to make people differentiate categories of paragraphs. like comments are Helvetica and posts are Arial, or vice versa.

Answer 4

Most of the fonts I've found on http://www.google.com/webfonts#HomePlace:home are quite good at most resolutions.

Answer 5

These links should prove helpful:

http://www.angelfire.com/al4/rcollins/style/fonts.html

http://www.hobo-web.co.uk/best-font-size/

Use only clear, commonly used fonts. Avoid the use of small text. Users should have the ability to scale fonts.

Answer 6

In my experience: Tahoma, Arial, Helvetica, Verdana, Times new romen are the safest.

In css3, you can use @font-face to embed other fonts - but you have to be careful and check the font license before using them in your site.

Answer 7

This problem lies with how the Operating System & Browsers handle the font. Because every browser and operating system rasterizes the font differently you can have different results for each browser.

My Suggestion for your Default font-family line is this

font-family:'Lucida Grande', Helvetica, Arial;

Also you should add

font-smooth:always;

to improve the smoothing of the font upon rasterization. This will make the text appear less pixelated.

Hope this helps!