Normalize.css: font-family: -apple-system,system-ui,BlinkMacSystemFont,"Segoe UI",Roboto,"Helvetica Neue",Arial,sans-serif

[DoronBrayer]

It's time to add:
font-family: -apple-system,system-ui,BlinkMacSystemFont,"Segoe UI",Roboto,"Helvetica Neue",Arial,sans-serif

This solution is harmless and very useful.
It is used by GitHub, Wordpress, Bootstrap, Medium, Ghost, etc.

The main reason for using "system" fonts is performance. Fonts are typically one of the largest/heaviest resources loaded on a website. If we can use a font already available on the user’s machine, we can completely eliminate the need to fetch this resource, making load times noticeably faster.
The beauty of system fonts is that it matches what the current OS uses, so it can be a comfortable look.

• -apple-system targets San Francisco in Safari (on Mac OS X and iOS), and it targets Neue Helvetica and Lucida Grande on older versions of Mac OS X. It properly selects between San Francisco Text and San Francisco Display depending on the text’s size.
• system-ui represents the default UI font on a given platform.
• BlinkMacSystemFont is the equivalent for Chrome on Mac OS X.
• Segoe UI targets Windows and Windows Phone.
• Roboto targets Android and newer Chrome OS. It is deliberately listed after Segoe UI so that if you’re an Android developer on Windows and have Roboto installed, Segoe UI will be used instead.

The bottom line: It's truly the ultimate solution for any website/webapp in any OS.

More info

[kevinvanrijn]

Didn't normalize.css just get rid of opinionated defaults? I don't see how this would be less opinionated then the old font-family: sans-serif; rule.

[russmaxdesign]

This is opinionated. See this thread #664

[DoronBrayer]

Using system fonts is not "opinionated".
System fonts are just system fonts.
If you insist, use:
font-family: -apple-system,system-ui,BlinkMacSystemFont,"Segoe UI",Roboto [Removing the "Helvetica Neue",Arial,sans-serif part]
This is normalization, not reset.
Again- this solution is used by GitHub, Wordpress, Bootstrap, Medium, Ghost, etc.

[miquelfire]

What browser is using ANY of these fonts by default?

[DoronBrayer]

Read:
Font stack in 2017

[thierryk]

@DoronBrayer that does not answer @miquelfire's question:

What browser is using ANY of these fonts by default?

Normalize relates to default styling and—as far as I know—browsers do not use system fonts out-of-the-box.

[DoronBrayer]

If 99% of the websites uses sans-serif as default, why go with the other 1%?! - Go with the majority, go with the 99%!
In addition - sans-serif is used by any framework out there, and there's a reason for that.
Not setting a font-family (in body or html) is so 2007.
It's time to move on, really.

[jonathantneal]

@DoronBrayer, I get what you are saying, but what you are describing is less the use case for bugs and common browser inconsistencies and more the use case for common developer expectations and preferences, like box-sizing: border-box, etc..

At least one project needs to hold the fort so to speak so that there may be a reliable base for your own projects, or bootstrap, or sanitize.css, etc.

[bardiharborow]

Noting for further reference, that we've had to back out system-ui over at Bootstrap due to a number of issues with faulty Chinese fonts on Windows.

[mvasilkov]

Since this feature isn't going to be added here, a shameless plug: https://github.com/mvasilkov/systematize
It's basically normalize.css with some improvements to typography, coming from this repo's pull requests mostly. WIP.

[uaoleg]

BlinkMacSystemFont is causing issue while printing on Chrome for Mac
https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=1018581

UPD it's fixed in Chrome 81

[ShikiSuen]

Please do not use "system-ui".

On Windows (i forgot in FireFox or Edge Chromium, but it must be at least one of them), it makes the browser unable to choose correct CJK fallback font, regardless the language code written in the HTML tag.

Please only use "-apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont," in this case. For Windows font fallback, simply use "Segoe UI" or "Calibri" (depending on the taste of bigger size or smaller size).

[Michaelsy]

@ShikiSuen
Did I get it right? Your plea is only relevant if there are Chinese, Japanese or Korean (or similar?) characters on the webpage?

Or in other words: When exactly is this a problem?

[ShikiSuen]

@Michaelsy If you think this is not a problem to you but you are not part of the team for this repo, then please shut up. Your hostility to East-Asian language users smells.

Ideograph glyph standards vary among Mainland PRC, HK, Taiwan, Korea, Japan. In Japan there are even two variants (industrial and educational variants). There are lots of political correctness matters regarding these standards. Not to mention that on Windows the default system UI fonts for CJK languages are having different amount of supported glyphs. Suppose that a Simplified Chinese webpage on Windows get fallbacked to a JIS standard font, one will see something similar to a mix-typed paragraph in two different fonts, a typographic disaster.

Read through the book ISBN 978-0596514471 written by a retired US marine, if you have further curiosities.

[ShikiSuen]

The reason I wrote my initial complaints above in this thread is to concern that some ideas in the font fallback sequence provided in the beginning post (of this thread) may trigger issues to CJK users.

(Swear comments removed because they are not useful anymore.)

[Michaelsy]

If you think this is not a problem to you ...

I apologise for the fact that I seem to have formulated my question in such a misleading way.

No, I don't think that is not a problem. Rather, I want to understand the problem so that I can take the right action if necessary.

[Michaelsy]

@ShikiSuen My question more concrete: I write websites exclusively in English and German (with German umlauts like ä Ä ü Ü and for example the "ß")

Can it lead to display errors on Asian screens if I refer to "system-ui"?

[ShikiSuen]

@ShikiSuen My question more concrete: I write websites exclusively in English and German (with German umlauts like ä Ä ü Ü and for example the "ß")

Can it lead to display errors on Asian screens if I refer to "system-ui"?

Back to your personal case: as long as no one puts East-Asian language contents on your website, no problem to you (personally).

Your case closed.

P.S.: I repeated the same issue with FireFox on macOS. If this really is a FireFox issue then I think I have to ticket it to their bugzilla.