from Hacker News

GitHub.com font changed

by dariubs on 7/11/16, 6:23 PM with 36 comments

  • by rvern on 7/11/16, 9:20 PM

    One of the most useful options in Firefox is the checkbox "Allow pages to choose their own fonts, instead of my selections above"[1], also available as browser.display.use_document_fonts in about:config. When this is unchecked, Firefox will ignore all fonts specified by web pages and just use the much-more-likely-to-be-reasonable choice of default font you have made; and you can then disable web fonts, which will make pages load faster.

    I don't think allowing websites to use specific font names in CSS was ever a good idea. It would have been better to limit them to predefined family names, which would map to fonts the user could customize. In any case, this allows me not to care about the whims of website designers and to always have text in a readable font. Only one issue: one of the unfortunate trends in web design is to use web fonts for icons. Not allowing websites to specify different fonts from the default also happens to break the icons. This isn't enough of a big deal for me to disable the option, but it's an annoyance worth knowing about.

    [1]: https://clbin.com/bFSlHF.png

  • by mastax on 7/11/16, 8:48 PM

        apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Oxygen, Ubuntu, Cantarell, "Fira Sans", "Droid Sans", "Helvetica Neue", Arial, sans-serif, "Apple Color Emoji", "Segoe UI Emoji", "Segoe UI Symbol"
    Helvetica, arial, nimbussansl, liberationsans, freesans, clean, sans-serif, "Apple Color Emoji", "Segoe UI Emoji", "Segoe UI Symbol"
    sans-serif
    Seems like they're just trying to use whatever decent sans-serif font is available.

  • by r24y on 7/11/16, 7:24 PM

    Viewing it on OS X, it looks like they're using the San Francisco font. A little jarring if you're used to seeing the old typeface 20+ times/day, but it looks good.

    Fortunately, the transition seems to have gone a bit better than Medium's: https://medium.com/design/system-shock-6b1dc6d6596f#.j5z5g5g...

  • by f1lt3r on 7/13/16, 2:42 PM

  • by gnuvince on 7/12/16, 4:57 AM

    Goddamn, I hate Roboto, it is way too fat by default.

  • by fo747 on 7/12/16, 12:37 PM

    Bold markdown is basically broken on OSX+Chrome, see before & after screenshots here, which I tweeted at Github: https://twitter.com/MrOlovsson/status/752843094765236224

  • by AnonymousPlanet on 7/12/16, 9:16 AM

    You can alias fonts in Linux, i.e., replace one font with any other. Font Manager is a nice UI for this. I never found anything like it for Windows or OS X.

  • by misaochan on 7/12/16, 3:44 AM

    How do I get the old font back? Chrome/Windows font is terrible!

  • by Phil_Latio on 7/11/16, 8:47 PM

    Segoe UI on Windows. Roboto looks way better.

  • by haukur on 7/12/16, 5:01 AM

    The idea behind this change seems to be centred around using a modern font no matter what device the user is on while not sacrificing performance. The trade-off here is brand consistency, but if the alternatives are to use an archaic font or a slow webfont, I think this approach wins.

  • by armabiz on 7/12/16, 11:01 AM

    Firefox hack:

    There is an extension to override/inject CSS for specific domains: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/stylish/

    Old styles can be grabbed from the: https://github.com/rreusser/the-old-github-font/blob/master/...

    After applying the following config: http://i.imgur.com/hGffN8I.png GitHub look is back to normal.

  • by nathancahill on 7/12/16, 2:36 AM

    Anyone know what it was previously? I'm writing a user stylesheet to change it back.

  • by jedireza on 7/11/16, 8:44 PM

    Yeah, I'm getting Cantarell rendering on Gnome, it's no San Francisco.

  • by boromi on 7/11/16, 7:30 PM

    Looks terrible on chrome on windows arrrgg why did it have to change

  • by neelkadia on 7/12/16, 6:33 AM

    previous was a lot better.

  • by ivotron on 7/21/16, 7:51 PM

    and there I was trying to fix my Firefox (clearing caches, cookiest, etc.) ... XD