Before that we had only web standard font stacks. Solutions like google Fonts and webkit fonts are in commonplace use only in Recent years.

And then for other OSs the font stack defines fallback to whichever default sans-serif assigned in the OS.Īlthough the use of seems trivial today, its been in common use only for several years. Arial is not a standard font in Apple iOS and OSX, Helvetica is, and vice versa in Windows. If you browse the same large brand websites you'll find Helevtica in use rather than Arial, because the standard web-safe font stack ensures that standard fonts are being used per each specific OS. Even if fonts are on cdns and are cached, they'd prefer to take no risks.įurthermore, it's not only Arial. So in the pursuit of ever decreasing their website load time, cutting overheads where they can, they rely on pre-installed fonts instead of having to make more server calls, and waiting for bespoke fonts to download. Thats a huge price to pay for load time delays. For example, in their case, if theres a 500ms (half a second, mind you) delay, there's an increase of 5% in site abandonship.

To add to the answer above, Amazon UX studies have led them to understand that with every 100ms delay to their website load time, they lose 1% in sales. so obviously this matters UX-wise, so please answer something that's not abvious. NOTE: Everyone know that Arial is easy to read etc. Is one business/company looking at another for choosing their font or what? I'm pretty certain that there must be a good reason that Arial still in use amongst top businesses like Google Search (despite they have material design dedicated website), Gmail, Amazon, eBay, StackExchange and many many more.Īpart from being free and familiar to people, what's its main purpose that this font is still in use?Ĭan't big businesses like Amazon, eBay and many more can't afford a good premium font that would not only look good but also be part of their branding? Of course they can but the question is why they don't!!! I've done my homework and searched for this and similar questions but nothing came up! but it's been quite a long time that I'm keep thinking of this question whenever I have to choose a font for my UI design! It may be totally irrelevant or off topic from what others asks.

Arial font stack