This died mostly because the defaults were so terrible.

This died because convention > configuration

Most users do not want to configure fonts or anything really to use the web.

I think it is deeper than personal want. i have a feeling that the more people communicate to each other about something, the more they value their personal experience to be relatable. Every customization makes your experience less relatable.

Wow, I never thought about that in this category. Thanks for this insight.

This could have ended up as a few simplified settings, as presented to most users... as we have with light and dark modes. Colorblind themes (for multiple kinds of colorblindness, say), high-readability themes for people who need the large-print editions of books, that kind of thing. Doesn't have to mean making everyone pick exact point values for every type of H tag, or whatever. A few presets in a dropdown could be really helpful—again, just look how everyone goes nuts over something as simple as having a "dark mode" setting.

I know a few friends who have 'custom' fonts on their phones. I assume they are from preset options, just nonstandard. It is a surprisingly jarring experience when they hand me their phone to do something or read something. I get a similar response because I have my text as small as possible on my phone.

There are certainly people who like to tweak things a little, and then there are the tinkerers who want to use custom fonts or other changes. I wonder if the customization slowed down as computers for work got more standardized? Or maybe interchangeable is a better word.

> There are certainly people who like to tweak things a little, and then there are the tinkerers who want to use custom fonts or other changes. I wonder if the customization slowed down as computers for work got more standardized?

As the expectation became "We should design our products so that the most technologically inept person can use it" customization in general got sidelined and a huge number of users are either unaware of what customization options still exist or lack the confidence or capability to take advantage of it. The result is that for most people's stuff, everything looks standardized and a small number of folks (the ones who have always loved customizing and personalizing everything) are the exception.

Perhaps those of us who like to customize were always doomed to be the exception rather than the rule since sticking with defaults is the path of least resistance and as long as something mostly works many users won't bother to change anything at all. It's also harder for the pro-customization crowd because eventually developers are going to consider something along the lines of: "The majority of our users use whatever defaults we impose on them, and having things more standardized can make it easier for support anyway, so why are we spending time/resources maintaining all these customization options that only a few people use and which could potentially make a clueless user confused and angry." which can lead to further restricting/limiting customization options.

> I know a few friends who have 'custom' fonts on their phones.

It can get much worse. I have a friend who uses a "cute", handwritten-looking font on her phone. She is Chinese. When she sends me screenshots, I can barely read them. I have enough trouble with standard characters.

QQ took that one step further, and let you customize the font in which your messages appeared to other people. I don't think QQ is as popular as it was, though.

> I know a few friends who have 'custom' fonts on their phones.

The weird thing is, whenever I see a custom font (or at least when it’s noticeable) on a phone, it’s Comic Sans. It’s usually people who are not super tech savy, but still they went out of their way to customize their phone to show them all interface elements in Comic Sans.

Comic Sans is extremely legible on small screens for people with poor eyesight. It's a perfectly acceptable use of the font.

Interesting, I did not know that. But I don’t think it’s relevant, none of them have bad eyesight, and they also make heavy use of backgrounds that make things harder to read (though, maybe CS counteracts the issue).

I think people who aren't sufficiently tuned into computer geek and/or Web and/or font nerd culture are aware that they're supposed to think Comic Sans is bad, and instead they like it. I see it used all the time, in many contexts, by people who seem to just think it's fun.

I notice often when other people have worse eyesight then me, it wouldn't surprise me if you're unaware of how good your eyesight actually is and/or your friend believes their eyesight is at least above average (at least with glasses) when maybe it's not.

I think it also died because styling could so easily destroy legibility. If text display areas were specifically designed with some fancy script like Helvetica in mind and I preferred Courier New the UI (if poorly designed) would often just break whole-sale.

This died when the web became mostly a marketing tool for businesses. It's a shame, but inevitable.

My favorite part of HN is when someone posts something I webbed in 1995, and then a ton of people complain that their browser defaults make the content look ugly.

But they're complaining about me, not their browser.

Every time i need to read some text longer than a few lines, I run Firefox Reader mode. It is great.

But all browsers can already do this. Most people don’t enable that setting, however. Could either be because they prefer to see the site as it’s intended to look, or because they’re unaware of the setting.

That's because it's buried (and has been increasingly so over the decades), it'll mess up some sites and won't do anything on a bunch of others because no-one accounts for user-defined colors/margins/fonts anymore when designing for the web, and it has more options than most people want/need to deal with.

A simple browser-provided theme dropdown containing a few nice options, directly in the main browser chrome, from a major browser (perhaps Firefox, back when it still counted as "major") could have changed things completely—see the pressure on sites to support "dark mode" now that that's a simple option to enable.

It'd be nearly impossible to change now, but 10-15 years ago, maybe it could have been changed, if any of the very small number of entities steering the direction of the web had tried.

Yeah the web was much more usable when you could change it with some simple and intuitive edits to .Xresources.

Yet theming with exactly two options (light/dark) is quite popular.

It was a UX problem, not a problem with the core concept.

Now, decades in to The Web, it's also a chicken/egg problem, because almost no sites are designed to behave OK under reasonable customization by the user, and almost no users customize their browsers' default styles, so why would sites change to accommodate that? Aside from the light/dark thing, of course, and you do see users pushing for support for that, and sites putting in effort to support it.

If Apple expands Dark Mode to include a half-dozen other options for a11y and such, I bet you'd see support for those become fairly common. It's just got to have a decent UI and the push has to come from a browser with a large enough user-base to encourage site operators to care. Once upon a time, Firefox could likely have done it, assuming they could manage not to screw it up. These days, Apple, Google, and MS are the only ones who could realistically try.

Actually, we have another version of this, now that I think about it: reader mode. People seem to really like it.