Web Safe fonts - What exactly does that mean?

Question

I know which fonts are web safe font but I'm not sure about the definition: Is a web safe font one that your browser support or a font that is installed on your Operating System? So, if a font cannot be displayed in your browser, is it because your browser cannot render the font or is it because the font is not installed on your operating system?

Thank You

Answer 1

A web safe font is one that is installed on the majority of systems. (A font doesn't become safe just because someone installs it, it is safe if it is reasonable to assume that it will be available).

Support in browsers for the fonts is implicit.

Answer 2

“Web safe font” is a vague and poorly named idea, and not very modern. It has been used to refer to fonts that are (assumed to be) installed on “all” or “most” computers; it’s at most “most” in reality, but the word “safe” in the name of the concept suggests “all”.

The idea implies that a web author specifies a font in CSS (or, in the old days, <font> tag in HTML). This means that browsers will use the font if properly installed in the system, e.g. placed in the Fonts folder on Windows.

No font is really “safe”, i.e. installed on all systems, but some fonts come close. There is no hard, reliable statistics on this, but reasonably good estimates.

The more modern approach is to use “font stacks”, or more prosaically lists of fonts. For example, the simple “stack” of font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif is probably as web-safe as you ever need to get, but you are only “safe” in getting one of the three rather similar fonts.

So called web fonts, or downloadable fonts, used via @font face in CSS, are “safe” in the sense that the font will be used no matter what fonts are installed on each computer. They are not safe in other ways, though; the use of such fonts might be disabled in a browser (or unsupported in old browsers), and the download of a font might fail for a variety of reasons, like Internet fetches in general. Moreover, browser have bugs in their implementations, possibly resulting in distorted display of a font.

Answer 3

A web safe font is one that is installed on your computer. This includes fonts installed from Photoshop or any other program.

As you can imagine, not many people have Photoshop! For this reason many fonts from Photoshop are considered not web-safe fonts.

A common list of web safe fonts can be found here.

If you would like to use different fonts i strongly suggest font face.