Update

Please see Standard Web Fonts Revisited.

When choosing fonts for web pages I usually end up limiting myself to four or five (Verdana, Arial, Tahoma, Trebuchet MS). Why, you ask? To make sure that the majority of visitors to the web site are capable of viewing the site as intended.

Lately, however, I’ve found myself growing tired of the same old fonts. I need to spice things up (for myself as well as the visitors).

So, my question to you is… What are the standard fonts that are available to Windows, Unix/Linux and Mac users? What can I do to spice things up? What web-compatible fonts are you fond of at the moment?

Recently MSN opened it’s AdCenter Contextual Advertising program to signups for one day. So I figured ‘why not?’. Upon visiting the signup page using Mozilla Firefox I was greeted with an error that the page does not work in firefox (it doesn’t even work in Internet Explorer 7 either!). So, I launched IE6 and visited the same page.

I went through the steps until I came to a page asking for credit card details. In the previous steps I had entered my country as Ireland, but on the credit card details page it told me that Ireland was not recognised as a valid country for credit card use.

In a way I’m glad that I couldn’t go any further in the signup process, because it turns out there is a signup fee of $5. Now $5 isn’t a lot, but how come Google AdSense and YPN! don’t charge for signups?

All in all, I think MSN should have put more thought into the signup process before opening it to the public. I know it’s still in Beta, but I don’t feel that that’s a good enough excuse. Lots of Google services are in Beta too, but they work a lot better.