The article didn't really explain why they are bad, and why is Arial worse than Helvetica, and why is Helvetica Neue is better. It just went on with ramblings and snobbishness about some hinting problems and unexplained screenshots with big, intrusive labels. As a person with minimal knowledge about typography, I understand what hinting is, but I don't see the problem unless it is clearly pointed out to me. So my general thought is maybe they are not the best, they are just as bad as MP3 sound clips and JPG screenshots ;-) are -- i.e. It gets the point across for most people.
A bigger problem is, to many international users (and news publishers that have articles with names in international characters), it matters if it works. In that regard, Arial and Times New Roman are the winners hands-down. They will display whatever you can possibly imagine. Part of the reasons why many people chose those fonts over the "fucking amazing" fonts that the author suggested (Georgia included) is that most of them have abysmal international support. "日本語," "中文," "ไทย," or "Tiếng Việt," for example, reads just as well as rectangular boxes in Georgia [1] (fallbacks will cure the rectangular boxes but Georgia with fallbacks looks like crap in the case of "Tiếng Việt").
Verdana and Tahoma are not compact enough for many of the applications I was planning to do. The capitalized "I" character in Tahoma is annoying at best and plain ugly to look at at worst.
On a personal level, the Ubuntu-esque font in TFA somehow rustles my jimmies.
You are correct - I was wrong. "Tiếng Việt" works here without fallbacks [1], though.
My theory is that the fallbacks are designed to work well for those popular fonts so it doesn't look off when the system falls back. The consistency in the width of the stroke seems to be the most important factor to my eyes. Here [2] you can see the mix looks natural, while in Georgia in dev tool it looks inconsistent. The screenshot is made on my Ubuntu computer.
A bigger problem is, to many international users (and news publishers that have articles with names in international characters), it matters if it works. In that regard, Arial and Times New Roman are the winners hands-down. They will display whatever you can possibly imagine. Part of the reasons why many people chose those fonts over the "fucking amazing" fonts that the author suggested (Georgia included) is that most of them have abysmal international support. "日本語," "中文," "ไทย," or "Tiếng Việt," for example, reads just as well as rectangular boxes in Georgia [1] (fallbacks will cure the rectangular boxes but Georgia with fallbacks looks like crap in the case of "Tiếng Việt").
Verdana and Tahoma are not compact enough for many of the applications I was planning to do. The capitalized "I" character in Tahoma is annoying at best and plain ugly to look at at worst.
On a personal level, the Ubuntu-esque font in TFA somehow rustles my jimmies.
1: https://www.myfonts.com/fonts/microsoft/georgia/