As you discovered with my previous entry, I was looking for nice condensed web fonts (read: native) for my headings. Well, I found plenty for everyone but for Chrome on Windows. Chrome issue is troublesome for me because this combination represent 30% of my traffic right now, by far outweighing other combinations of browser/OS.

How come I couldn't do it? I could do it with IE, Firefox on all platforms and Safari on all its platforms. Even Chrome on non-Windows platforms. It turns out that Chrome does not support the font-stretch: condensed CSS attribute. On other platforms, there are fonts that are condensed and can be targeted by using their name, but alas, Arial Narrow is not a font you can target with Chrome (nor with Firefox), even though IE can target it. Note that Franklin Gothic is in the same situation.

It's the first time Chrome is lagging in terms of features behind IE and Firefox (at least on something I use).

Let's hope Google addresses this problem as Arial Narrow is pretty much everywhere. And it's a pretty nice font, even though Helvetica people have probably left my website by now.

Edit on October 16: It is an issue with Chrome 37. So hopefully it'll get patched soon.

Edit on October 21: Chrome 38 is out. This is fixed.

Responses[2]

Posted by pieroxy on October 15, 2014 6:08:00 AM PDT #