Cambria and Chrome

After read­ing Eight Defin­it­ive Font Stacks over a Site­Point, I decided to have a look at the dif­fer­ences between the font choices, par­tic­u­larly the use of the Vista fonts (Cam­bria, Con­stan­tia, Cal­ibri, Cor­bel, Segoe UI and Con­solas) so I fired up the Vista vir­tual machine to have a look at the dif­fer­ences between Cam­bria and Times New Roman, the two win­dows fonts in the first stack at 50px for closer inspec­tion. If you have Cam­bria and Times New Roman installed this is the test page I used.

On close inspec­tion, I like Cam­bria and the idea of using it for body copy. Just need to find a suit­able Mac font and a fall­back for those XP machines without it. Times New Roman has never cut it as a body copy font for me. On the other hand Times New Roman looks so eleg­ant at large text sizes, that I could not bear to use Cam­bria as a dis­play text(Title and head­ings) if Times New Roman was available.

Mind­ful of the recent Chrome and Safari render the same…or do they? dis­cus­sion on the WSG mail­ing list. I fired up all the test browsers on that machine to see if there are any dif­fer­ences in font ren­der­ing between IE8, Firefox3.1 beta, Safari 3.1, Opera 10 alpha and Chrome. The res­ults have been com­bined into single image.

The shock was how dif­fer­ently Chrome rendered the text to all the other browsers. The type is sig­ni­fic­antly heav­ier with Chrome, look­ing more like a semibold ver­sion of the typeface, when com­pared to all the other browsers, which rendered the type identical to my untrained eye.

I have always known that type on the web is far from per­fect. But by select­ing the right fonts and using rel­at­ive sizes, you could deliver a fairly con­sist­ent typo­graph­ical exper­i­ence to most users no mat­ter what OS, browser, installed fonts and user set­tings they had. Chrome takes your care­fully con­struc­ted typo­graphy and makes it darker and dra­mat­ic­ally chan­ging your design. Oliver Reichen­stein said Web design is 95% typo­graphy that is because Google Chrome now has a 5% mar­ket share.

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 10th, 2009 at 8:48 pm and is filed under css and html . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.