Reading the font stack of the web

I spent a weekend crawling the font-family declarations of the top few thousand sites, just to see what people actually ship.

The headline: the “system font stack” won. Some variant of -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, "Segoe UI", Roboto, sans-serif appears, nearly verbatim, on a huge share of sites — copied from the same handful of blog posts, typos and all. A few sites still list fonts that shipped with Windows 98.

Web fonts are common but rarely alone; most stacks name a hosted font first and a system fallback right behind it. And Comic Sans MS is a real, deliberate choice on more sites than you’d guess. Good for them.