: Is it time to drop Courier from your monospace font stacks? 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

@Martha676

Drop specific named fonts entirely from your CSS.

All modern browsers have user preferences for fonts (sans-serif, serif, fantasy, cursive and monospace). By default these are set to sensible values, for most browsers this comes to: <default>=sans-serif, sans-serif=Arial, serif=Times New Roman, monospace=Courier New, or similar font faces to those. So setting font-family: Arial, sans-serif; in your CSS is therefore pointless, as sans-serif most likely already aliases to Arial.

For accessibility reasons, you should respect these were possible. Aside from that, respecting user preferences is a great idea in general.

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@Megan663

As Nick says, keep Courier for Mac users. And for Linux users, don't forget Courier 10 Pitch, which isn't faint like Courier New. These are two ingredients of a Courier-like stack that suppresses Courier New.

If you prefer Liberation Mono to Courier, note that Google's Cousine is a Web Font identical to Liberation Mono.

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@Jessie594

It's safe to drop Courier...

Declaring "Courier New", monospace or just monospace should give you 100% monospace coverage on Windows, Mac, Linux, and mobile devices.

Courier New has been available since Windows 3.1, and all common OSes have monospace fonts available if Courier New isn't available. (Android has Droid Sans Mono, for example.)

...but that doesn't mean that you should

It's still worth considering Courier and even favouring it over Courier New in some situations, because Courier New is thinner and harder to read than Courier, especially on high-resolution screens and at smaller sizes.

Here's a screenshot of Courier New in Chrome on GitHub's site:



And here's the same section using Courier (which is what GitHub uses for Macs by default if you don't edit the CSS source for the purposes of demonstrating the differences):



The differences are subtle, but Courier is heavier and more legible at 12px than Courier New, especially if you have a lot of text to trawl through.

Github's monospace font stack is Consolas, "Liberation Mono", Courier, monospace. Although it's aimed at programmers, it's more interesting than declaring monospace, because it takes advantage of newer typefaces on some systems.

Consolas is the newer monospace font that ships with Windows Vista and Windows 7 and with MS Office, and Liberation Mono is installed by default on many flavours of Linux and favoured by some programmers.

As ever, it comes down to specific applications over general rules, as Su' implied in her answer. Drop Courier from your stack only if there's a good reason to do so. If you're declaring Courier after "Courier New" as a fallback, then you probably don't need to do that anymore. But, as ever, test both options and see what works in each use case, as GitHub clearly have.

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@Cody1181609

The question kind of implies it was ever not time; neither's really the case. Font stacks have always been entirely optional. Drop it if you want/feel it's appropriate.

If you think about it, your research is only actually of interest if you specifically did want old Courier(since it now seems to not want to display.)

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