Enough “Helvetica Neue” already!

As a Firefox 3 user, I was mystified when I upgraded from FF 2 to see that a few sites had some very ugly italic text going on. The number of sites not rendering “properly” has steadily grown to the point where I decided to figure out what the hell was going on.

Well it seems that FF3 doesn’t render “Helvetica Neue” very well… in fact it does a very bad job indeed!

This is a screen shot of the issue I’m talking about.

Shaun Inman posted a comparison which shows how the font should be displaying (it’s displaying like the 3rd font in the list and I’m assuming it should actually look like the 6th line!?)

Now I have lots of variations of Helvetica and Helvetica Neue on my system, but Vista seems to be having some difficulties with the anti-aliasing in Firefox.

Is anyone else seeing the same behaviour in their browser?

More to the point is anyone getting sick of using Firebug to modify the css on the fly to remove Helvetica Neue from the stylesheet!?

PS. for the record this font looks equally as crap in IE7 on my system.

UPDATE: Here’s another fairly popular site that’s using Helvetica Neue and this is what it looks like on my system – tut, tut Adobe.

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9 thoughts on “Enough “Helvetica Neue” already!”

  1. I have been equally disturbed by the trend of using this font. It’s showing up everywhere! Mine is, I think, even worse as compared to our screenshots – everything is in helevtica nueue black italic! the letters are like mush, and its driving me crazy! I’ve tested on multiple browsers and multiple machines, with the same results (all where windows). Could it be that page designers don’t know about it and are designing from the mac side? BARF

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  2. Well they’re either using Mac’s or our systems are doing something very whack to cause the results we’re seeing across all browsers.

    I’m actually surprised that more people haven’t commented about this; 73% of my readers are on PC’s

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  3. I have been seeing a similar problem but my Helvetica Neue is outlined. Very strange. I am on a Mac but have checked all my browsers to find only the same thing. Any other advice would be great.

    Thanks
    am

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  4. I basically had to delete it from my fonts folder as with the new Digg.com v4 website that is the main font they used and it looked HORRIBLE. Strange though because on my Windows 7 / Firefox 3 home machine it renders just fine (currently using Windows XP / Firefox 3 at work).

    Reply

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