Sam Trenholme’s blog

Font stacks: No more

October 3, 2025

I explain why font stacks are no more, and why one needs to use a webfont if they want to determine which font someone sees a webpage with.

Font stacks in 2025?

A couple of years ago, someone made a set of font stacks for modern web browsers. While a very noble effort, unfortunately they do not work here in 2025.

Font stacks made a lot of sense in the days of Internet Explorer 6 for a lot of reasons:

Dial up users did not have enough bandwidth to download webfonts.
Only IE supported webfonts, in a weird proprietary “eot” format¹
99% of desktop operating systems all had the same web safe fonts “Verdana/Georgia/Trebuchet/Times New Roman/Arial/etc.”

Things have changed a lot since then:

100k for a webfont package is a small file, even on a 4g network in a third world country.²
All mainstream current browsers support woff2 webfonts.³
On Android, font support is very limited and has no support for the old school “web safe” core fonts for the web (Verdana/etc.)

Looking at those font stacks in Firefox on my Android phone, “System UI” works, “Neo-Grotesque” gives a pencil thin font which is very difficult to read (“Inter” on my phone is pencil thin), “Slab Serif” actually looks nice (both in Windows, with Rockwell, and on Android, with Roboto Slab, but note that Chrome for Android does not allow Roboto Slab in a font stack), and “Handwritten” works for its purpose (Android uses a “Cursive” fallback font). All the other font stacks are giving me the system default serif/sans/mono fonts (either Noto or Roboto).

With Chrome on my Android phone, source sans pro is used a lot, as well as Google specific metric compatible versions of “Arial”, “Georgia”, “Courier New” which often times do not look like the font they are metrically compatible with. “Slab Serif” doesn’t work on Chrome for Android even though Roboto Slab is installed on my Android system.

Point being, Android has made web safe fonts a thing of the past.

Finding the best system fallback font

This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t have fallback fonts, of course.

There is a tool over at https://screenspan.net/fallback which is very good at finding out which system font is the best fallback font to have in the rare situations where a webfont can’t be loaded.

I use Georgia for my fallback font because it’s mostly compatible with the metrics for my webfont, and, like my webfont, is designed to be really easy to read on the screen.

Footnotes

1: I actually have EOT versions of the webfont used for this blog

2: CJK users have font files large enough where the download size might be an issue. In that case, we either accept the download size as part of a modern website, or we accept that Android users will generally get Noto while Mac/Windows users will get different looking system fonts.

3: Some people will turn off webfonts, but those people have made it clear they don’t care whether or not they get a font which looks like the design the webmaster intended.