Few people realize it but Microsoft has a secret monopoly on web typography. It achieved this back in 1996 when it made its Core Web Fonts package available for any operating system, as this article discusses.

Most web designers define standard font families in their code but they test their sites using computers with Arial, Times New Roman and Courier New installed. I doubt many web designers test how a site looks using the Bitstream Vera Sans font, for example, that comes with most Linuxes, or the Helvetica font supplied with Mac OS X (although OS X includes most of the popular Microsoft fonts anyway).

I’m as guilty as anybody of furthering this particular injustice. The first thing I do on a fresh Linux install is copy across all the fonts from my Windows partition. This is solely so that websites look like the designers intended.