Since then, I default to using sans-serif for copy where the typography is not intended to communicate beyond the content of the words, while continuing to use font stacks for headers. It’s a cheap way to keep expressive type in prominent places while reducing the risk of serious problems across the majority of content.

(Of course) audience and needs vary.

I would recommend using a CSS reset though.

This appears to an issue with anti-aliasing being turned turned off no some Windows computers. Cleartype is not *on* system wide on these computers and so Firefox is viewing text with no anti-aliasing. The bad news, this is a user setting and it’s hard to change those. The good news is that it’s pretty rare and becoming more rare as more people upgrade to IE 8.

If this is something that interests you, we wrote a series of blog posts that explains the intricacies of font rendering across different platforms and devices: http://j.mp/typerender

… if you’re a Windows XP Firefox user who has never modified your smoothing settings – and you happen to install IE8 – you would subsequently see ClearType-antialiased text in Firefox.