Is it time to drop Courier from your monospace font stacks?
- by Jeff
I've been fine-tuning my font stacks lately and was wondering if it's safe to drop Courier from my monospace font stack yet? Would you feel comfortable dropping it?
Of course, monospace is my final fallback.
Note 1:
OS Testbed: WinXP, WinVista, Win7, iPhone, iPad
Based on my research, these browsers now substitute Courier New for Courier by default:
IE9+
Chrome 2+
Firefox 10+
Safari 3.1+
iDevices
Note 2:
The default "font-family: monospace;" renders as Courier New in every browser I've tested, from IE6 through the latest iPhone/iPad devices. EDIT: One exception is Opera 12, which renders Consolas on Win. Opera 10 renders Courier New.
Note 3:
I've noticed that Courier refuses to render with any font smoothing (anti-aliasing) in any browser I've tested, regardless of system and/or browser display settings. Probably because it's an old bitmap font. This could be because of my system setup, however.
