It is a bit odd that "monospace" in a mac browser gets you Courier/Courier New, because macOS has come standard with Menlo for ages and Monaco since the OS 9 days, both of which are excellent monospace fonts that are far and away better than either Courier. Even weirder, outside of browsers requesting a monospace font will get you Menlo.

Newer releases also have San Francisco Mono that it could use instead, which is even better since it's tuned for modern displays.

Apple is notorious for wanting to push people away from portable and easy-to-use web applications to non-portable, expensive to develop, and frequently worse mobile apps.

It’s more that they don’t put the high level of refinement into the web experience that they are famous for in their native (Mac/iOS) applications.

Though of course there are plenty of discontents with that. On balance I think the apps that ship with MacOS are much worse than their Windows counterparts. I think iOS on the iPad is truly superior but the settings app is dark pattern city, particularly the notification that never goes away about the Apple TV trial that is about to expire but actually expired years ago.

DejaVu is not a websafe font, meaning you cannot rely on it being available. Why we can't just require browsers to include DejaVu or another open font is another question - not like the size matters compared to all the other crap they ship. Heck, some even ship their own fonts already, but only for emojis.

Even having some defined meta fonts with rough metrics so that you could say font-face: monospace-standard or whatever and have the text be roughly the same size everywhere would save so much effort and wasted data.

> Why we can't just require browsers to include DejaVu or another open font is another question

Including a small set of open fonts does seem like a good idea. I'd like to see Inter UI[0] included because it's a very nice screen/UI-optimized font would serve a similar purpose as "system-ui" does now, except without some of the pitfalls[1] that comes with.

[0]: https://rsms.me/inter/ [1]: https://infinnie.github.io/blog/2017/systemui.html

Don’t lump Courier and Courier New together. Courier (which Apple includes) is fine; it’s only Courier New (which Windows includes) that’s atrociously light, because it was digitised very badly incorrectly. It actually used to be not so bad, because they kinda patched it to make it usable with hinting, and then special-cased it in ClearType, but those don’t really go far enough and aren’t consistently reliable anyway, so it’s just an awful font.

But no browser defaults to Courier New any more—Firefox on Windows was the last browser to finally update to a better font, just under a year ago (see https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1607913).

As a Windows wizard, the first thing I do in any browser or text editor is change Consolas to Courier New.

I fucking can't stand Consolas, give me Courier New because that font is readable literally anywhere.

Ouch. It really does take all sorts.

Courier New is the most appalling piece of shit I've ever seen in my life. It's ugly at small sizes, jagged and unpleasant at medium sizes, and abhorrent at display sizes. WOW do I hate Courier. I hate it on Git Bash. I hate it in cmd, I hate that it exists. Consolas, by contrast, is lovely and beautifully-hinted at best, and inoffensive at worst.