Times New Roman versus Georgia font types

Note: This blog post is a rare example of an opinion/observation that is no longer relevant and/or represent my current views, but I’m keeping it here for historical reasons :-)


It seems that at the moment, the Georgia font type is winning the font race on the internet. But even for fonts, one has to ask whether or not the choice of font is good for cross-platform/browser compatibility. I was making some small changes to my business website the other day and I wanted to use the Georgia font since it is a well-designed and pleasant-to-look-at font. But on Ubuntu, the font is apparently missing… or so it seems. In fact, Firefox and Chrome renders the font in different ways. Firefox properly shows the Georgia font (or some version of it at least) while Chrome falls back and uses Times New Roman for almost all its serif fonts, as illustrated in the screenshot below.
Firefox and Chrome font comparison
Notice that the Georgia font is quite a bit bigger than Times New Roman. I use Chrome for my everyday needs and thus, a ton of websites appear to have a (too) small font size because they use the Georgia font. I think this is unfortunate and that’s why I have chosen to go back to the roots and use Times New Roman for my business website. Maybe you should too.

Here is a link to the document with the different fonts.

Update: I noticed that the screenshot is also rendered differently in Chrome and Firefox. In Firefox, it looks horrible on my screen until I click on it. Makes me happy that I’m using Chrome

Update: Sometime during an upgrade of either Ubuntu or Chrome, I now seem to have the Georgia font or at least som version of it. See below

5 comments

  1. I am regular reader, how are you everybody? This piece of writing posted at this web site is truly
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  2. Just to let you know the following sentence is missing an ‘s’:
    “In Firefox, it look[s] horrible on my screen until I click on it.”
    Have a nice day!

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