My Intuition

If you have ever worked on any website that required non-standard font family, have the font installed on your machine, but forgot to import it, and ends up getting the website rendering in a complete different look in your client’s browser (this is not me i promise đź‘€).

You will probably understand how beneficial it would be to just use a set of standardized font families that is widely supported on all devices, no more hustle of setting up your own font using tens of lines of @font-face declaration, and the performance won’t suffer from font loading (some true-type font ttf files can become huge, especially if it includes a wide range of characters and glyphs).

Why We Need “Web Safe Font” ?

We need web safe font because they ensure consistent rendering across different operating system and browser without requiring extra downloads, consdeir the below examples:

  • [Font Test - MacOS15 + Chrome138.png](Font Test - MacOS15 + Chrome138.png)

    Font Test - MacOS15 + Chrome138

  • [Font Test - MacOS15 + Safari18.png](Font Test - MacOS15 + Safari18.png)

    Font Test - MacOS15 + Safari18

  • [Font Test - Windows10 + Chrome106.png](Font Test - Windows10 + Chrome106.png)

    Font Test - Windows10 + Chrome106

Notice how web safe font such as “Aria” looks identical no matter which operating system or browser:

Comparison - Same font under different environment

and how font such as “Century Gothic” looks slightly different on different operating system and browser, this is because either the font is missing in the operating system (hence default back to the browser default font “Time New Roman”, or choose the next available font in the font-familiy attribute), or the browser choose to treat the font slightly differently than other browsers (for instance Safari emphasis on preserving the font’s original design and its aggressive font synthesis to create different weights):

Comparison - Same font under different environment

#1

Compatible on almost all OS and Browser (recommended by W3School):

Serif

  • Times New Roman (default font if you don’t specify font-family)
  • Georgia
  • Garamond

Sans-serif

  • Arial
  • Verdana
  • Tahoma
  • Trebuchet MS

Monospace

  • Courier New

Cursive

  • Brush Script MT

#2

Compatible on mordern OS and Browser (recommended by Flavio - CSS Handbook 2025):

Serif

  • Georgia
  • Palatino
  • Times New Roman
  • Times

Sans-Serif

  • Arial
  • Helvetica
  • Verdana
  • Geneva
  • Tahoma
  • Lucida Grande
  • Impact
  • Trebuchet MS
  • Arial Black

Monospace

  • Courier New
  • Courier
  • Lucida Console
  • Monaco

Reference: