Fallback fonts are a legacy of the past though, in an era where everybody ships at least hundred of kilobytes of JS and images (when it's not tens of megabytes, but this is another topic…) there's no good reason to specify a font and hope it will be found on the customer's OS: ship the font you're using.
No thanks, I don't want your shitty font file that only looks ok on whatever system you testet. All websites should use the system font for body text. The only problems is that a) the default browser font is usually some ugly shit instead of the system font and b) there is no way to specify size in a way that different fonts will actually be the same size. Both of these need to be fixed in the browser instead of hacking on more shit for each website.
> No thanks, I don't want your shitty font file that only looks ok on whatever system you testet.
Why would it looks bad elsewhere?
> All websites should use the system font for body text.
Wait what? There are very different requirements when it comes to reading system widgets and actual text! (like we don't use the same kind font for code and prose).
Which is why I've configured my browser to use the correct fonts that work for me. Use `font-family: revert;` for prose, and `font-family: system-ui;` for any widgets you've got.
I'm probably in a tiny minority, but I just flat out disable third party fonts. Everything looks equally good to me and I save bandwidth. The only expression are image fonts, which render as squares - I share the author's frustration.
Third party fonts are a privacy nightmare, especially when you know who's the biggest third party out there. But there's no good reason to source the fonts from a third party either: you can host them by yourself and serve them with the rest of the website.
Now disabling custom fonts altogether makes sense of you are trying yo save bandwidth, but then you aren't mad if things don't properly align.
You don't need 10Mbps to download a 30kB font file.
And if you're really targeting people that have trouble loading such a font file, then you have much, much bigger problems than centering things (you basically cannot put any image on your website).
> A 30kb font file kinda website is probably gonna serve a 2Mb all up web page
Where's that ratio coming from? Shipping fonts is just good practice when you want your website to look consistently on all platform, it doesn't mean anything else about how the website is made.
Also, 100kbps is a very slow connection, it's 2 orders of magnitude less than the 10Mbps you talked about earlier, and when you have this kind of very poor connection everything is kind of slow anyway (even the very barebone HN's front page is 120kb!).