Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Twitter's new font, Chirp, is apparently giving some users headaches

cnet.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 264 posts

Re: Twitter's new font, Chirp, is apparently giving some users headaches

#61

Post by kixiQu »

dkdbejwi383 wrote: post #5
userbinator wrote: post #2

This is what user stylesheets were intended to solve. Too bad the majority browsers have gone down the path of attempting to remove all customisation.

User stylesheets are a relic of Web 1.0, when the web was a series of hyperlinked documents. The transformation from web page to web application was not compatible with things like user stylesheets.

The business model where you need to stop your users from hiding ads was not compatible with things like user stylesheets. If CSS compilation didn't obfuscate class names and such, it'd be quite compatible.

Re: Twitter's new font, Chirp, is apparently giving some users headaches

#63

Post by Minor49er »

lucasmullens wrote: post #52
zippergz wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As you said, it is tweet-based. About a font on Twitter. The Tweets in the article show the font.

I have no way of knowing if this was rolled out to 100% of users, or if they updated their embedded tweets to use the font. But more importantly I just want to see a side-by-side comparison.

Not only that, but when they inevitably change the font again, it would be nice to be able to read a then-old article to see what the font looked like when it was announced.

Re: Twitter's new font, Chirp, is apparently giving some users headaches

#64

Post by sli »

ceejayoz wrote: post #21
userbinator wrote: post #2

This is what user stylesheets were intended to solve. Too bad the majority browsers have gone down the path of attempting to remove all customisation.

I don't blame the browsers, really. Look at the source code of Twitter or Facebook. It's intentionally obfuscated and mangled, probably in part to fuck with ad blockers. I have a few user stylesheets (even a little custom Firefox extension to block one user's comments on a site I frequent), but the sites I'd really like to use them on largely don't make it possible to do so. Look at a Facebook ad in your browser's we…

* { font-family: 'Verdana, sans-serif !important' }

Re: Twitter's new font, Chirp, is apparently giving some users headaches

#65

Post by bee_rider »

mihaic wrote: post #33

To anyone saying "Users will complain about anything", I'm on a Windows desktop and this is honestly the most unpleasant reading experience I've had on any big website in recent memory. There seems to be an issue with the OS antialiasing that is rendering characters slightly blurry to feel it's not focused, further straining my eyes. Seems to have only been tested on Bay Area Apple devices.

I like it. It is hard to read and easy to skip over, which is just about perfect for tweets.

Re: Twitter's new font, Chirp, is apparently giving some users headaches

#66

Post by aaomidi »

The new font is also destroying Arabic and Farsi text. Does Twitter not have a single Farsi or Arabic speaking employee?

This is an indication that they really don't value diverse employees there. Can't believe no one was like "hey this is destroying readability of these two major languages."

Re: Twitter's new font, Chirp, is apparently giving some users headaches

#67

Post by Analemma_ »

mbesto wrote: post #57
browningstreet wrote: post #25

Not every thing on the Internet needs its own font. (I say as the former head of a type foundry.)

I forget when this has been discussed before but a lot of major digital companies (Apple, Microsoft, Adobe, etc.) end up creating their own fonts for legitimate business reasons that are totally unrelated to design/usability. I can't seem to find the reference, but I think it had to do with licensing/commercial reasons.

A lot of font foundries switched from one-time lump-sum payments to pay-per-use, thinking they’d make a whole bunch of money from the scale of big digital companies, and not realizing this would just cause these companies to design their own fonts instead. Really short-sighted IMO.
Post reply on HN