What do we call fonts you can safely assume are installed on the majority of your users' browsing devices?

• A. Web-Safe
• B. Standard Fonts
• C. Fallback Fonts
• D. Custom Fonts

Answer: (A)

Web-safe fonts are fonts you can safely assume are installed on most users’ devices, so they render consistently without needing to load extra font files. These are the common typefaces that ship with operating systems across Windows, macOS, iOS, Android, and Linux, like Arial, Verdana, Trebuchet MS, Times New Roman, Georgia, and Courier New. When designing, you can rely on these fonts being present and create a font-family stack that starts with one of them, followed by other web-safe options as fallbacks. This minimizes rendering surprises and avoids font loading issues across different devices and browsers.

Other terms don’t fit as well. Custom fonts are not installed by default and require loading, which is the opposite of what web-safe implies. Fallback fonts describe what the browser should use if the preferred font isn’t available, but the basic idea of a web-safe font is the set of fonts you can assume are already on user devices. Standard fonts isn’t a standard designation in this context.