Update - These changes are now live!
TL;DR We’re shipping system fonts as our default font stack. We plan to do this on May 10th, 2021.
What?
We’re planning on specifying system fonts on Stack Overflow and the Stack Exchange Network. On macOS and iOS, you’ll see things set in San Francisco. On Wi...
The bigger underlying problem is that designers always wanted full control over gute things looked. Rather than what things mean. Letting the browser decide the layout (as in plain HTML)
I'm on Mac and only notice a difference in the font when writing a new answer
I did notice when they changed the (line) spacing (to 1.6??) last year and it was too much for me to read well before they settled on a middle ground. The font either hasn't changed for me, or has no difference in readability and I don't notice
@DavidW the subset of luddites on Windows. Not that everyone who uses win is a luddite. But the cry was "Why not use Arial. Arial web font is free to use and unchanged since '95."
I dunno about Arial, I never really paid attention to the font before. But what was switched to is quite a bit worse, at least for usability on Win 10. It's fainter and washed out, definitely harder to read. It's not as bad rendered in black, which brings it back to about the readability of the previous font.
But the current text colour is only about 85% black.
Normally I don't notice Windows very much. I spend my time in the IDE, the browser, and shell windows. (Well, and Teams and Zoom and Slack and, sadly, Outlook.)
I don't even interact with the start menu on 90% of days.
Or whatever you/they call the grotesquerie that erupts when you accidentally click left of the leftmost application icon.
(outlook is pretty ok now. It was a complete nightmare but that seems only the non 365 webpage)
@DavidW at my last job I usually did hit the widows key and typed the name of the app I needed. On most days that was Chromium, RDP, and VirtualBox only.
I just lock the screen at night, and leave everything running. (Saves time restarting VMs, redeploying the appserver and apps, etc.) So when I log on in the morning everything is there. I maybe hit the Windows key when I want to run Gimp or get to the control panel.
And never ever mistakenly open the standalone office apps. They load for ages and slow everything down to a crawl. I accidentally opened files with local Excel from time to time.
I think we only have the standalone apps. Certainly the clients would freak out if they found out we were loading their spreadsheets into a cloud app that might mirror their data into the cloud.
Something on the corporate notebook prevented it getting to deeper sleep states. It burned something like 10W the whole night. So I always shut it down.
I don't think it's a problem in Europe. MS has GDPR compliant services. The legal advisors also audited and ruled that the exact technical implementation is of no concern to clients as long as it is compliant with finance regulation, GDPR, and those other audit rules.
I don't know the exact rules, but I know a couple of our clients (including the one I'm working on) have numerous banks (37 in this case I think) as their clients. So they're bound by all kinds of requirements from all over the world. I think they're just defensively paranoid; we're not even allowed access to a lot of information, and there's heavy auditing on what we can access.
That old thinking was also in my old company. Can you imagine they were mailing xls files back and forth renaming them at every iteration when they wanted to collaborate!
Right now there isn't even anyone on my team permitted to view the production logs. (Despite the fact we've had a couple of audits to make sure no passwords, client account names, account numbers, etc. are written to them.)
Oh no, no e-mail! You don't e-mail confidential information!
You RDP into a secure server to view it.
It's like working in heavy mitts sometimes, but it's genuinely secure.
@BicyclesMeta Maybe instead of demanding that the site conform to your belief of how it should work, you should relax, and just accept that sometimes different people do things different ways? I bet you're a joy to work with too.
Oh and @Criggie that comment thread looks really strange with a bunch of replies from you to comments that don't exist anymore. Which is one reason that premature clean-up is annoying.
I'd leave a single funny comment alone, for example. Whereas other SE sites have a strict "no humour" policy. Others even have a dedicated day/period for less-seriousness, like our [april-fool] tag.
yeah - and Bicycles.SE isn't a big site, so every user lost is gone. Sites like SO have millions of users. We have to literally "be nice" to all new users where reasonable.
hehehe
you know those comment flags mean nothing, right ? They don't give rep.
The only good a comment upvote does is if the section gets collapsed, then the higher rated comments are left exposed and lower-rated comments are hidden.