[ken]

> They continue to be used everywhere because they offer a consistency that's impossible to get otherwise.

That sounds backwards to me. Using standard fonts is how you achieve consistency. Using a custom font for just your webpage is not helping me (the user) get consistency at all. That's what 'standard' means.

(Frequently, custom fonts also hurt readability, which is why I hit "reader mode" on nearly every webpage these days. Every single day I run across webpages with custom fonts that I literally struggle to read.)

The situation is just like early versions of Mozilla or Java, where they used the same UI toolkit on all platforms for "consistency". Eventually, programmers realized that users tend to switch between applications more often than they switch operating systems, so the way to achieve consistency for actual users is to match the local environment.

> Variability in system fonts means [...]

Yes, all of those are real problems. That's why I've set up my web browser in a way that results in legible text for me. As per the Pottery Barn Rule, if you use a custom font, you're taking responsibility for all of these issues -- and you're going to screw up at least some of them (or something you didn't think of), and I'll hate your webpage for it.

[ancarda]

>Every single day I run across webpages with custom fonts that I literally struggle to read.

Have you considered turning off custom fonts? Firefox lets you do this -- Preferences > General > Fonts and Colors section > Advanced > [ ] Allow pages to choose their own fonts.

I did months ago and it has only improved the web for me. The sole exception is people abusing fonts for icons. But that is thankfully not very common.

[chipotle_coyote]

> Using standard fonts is how you achieve consistency.

If my web page downloads a font to a browser for that browser to use, every browser capable of downloading that font will use that font.

If my web page specifies a list of fonts that users may or may not have on their system, every browser may display a different font from that list (or even a font not from that list).

I suppose YMMV and all that, but I would say the first case is clearly giving a more consistent result than the second case. That doesn't make the second case "bad," per se, but on my system Hacker News is in Verdana and on different distributions of Linux it's in... shrug emoji? There's a Microsoft Core Fonts package floating around out there, but not everybody has it installed. And lately it's become fashionable to specify a font stack of "default system fonts," so Macs get San Francisco, Windows 7+ users get Segoe UI, etc. That's fine, and maybe it's exactly what you want... but don't call it "consistent."

I almost guarantee you have fonts on your system installed that you will not want me to use on a web page, and I can also almost guarantee you that there are a lot of pages out there that have "custom fonts" that are just fine. They're just fine! Nobody reads a web page set in Charter or Franklin Gothic or any other rational typeface for body text and screams in outrage at its illegibility.

Maybe there are designers out there who want to force terrible horrible no-good custom fonts down your throat because they want to make your reading experience worse. Maybe there are web pages set in Zapfino and Wingdings. I don't know. But when you say "custom fonts," I say "professional high-quality typeface that is consistent across all browsers." That's it. That's all I'm trying to give you.