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 you feel comfortable dropping it?Of course, monospace is my final fallback.Note 1:OS Testbed: WinXP, WinVista, Win7, iPhone, iPadBased on my research, these browsers now substitute Courier New for Courier by default:IE9+Chrome 2+Firefox 10+Safari 3.1+iDevicesNote 2:The default font-family: monospace; renders as Courier New in every browser I've tested, from IE6 through the latest iPhone/iPad devices. EDIT: One exception is Opera 12, which renders Consolas on Win. Opera 10 renders Courier New.Note 3:I've noticed that Courier refuses to render with any font smoothing (anti-aliasing) in any browser I've tested, regardless of system and/or browser display settings. Probably because it's an old bitmap font. This could be because of my system setup, however.
Is it time to drop Courier from your monospace font stacks?
fonts
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 shouldIt'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.