I’m a Twitter addict, and spend far too much time on the the site. I end up loading it one way or another, through some kind of 3rd party app or Firefox Extension (Twitbin is my favorite), but I pretty much go directly to their site most of the time.
It was to my misfortune when I logged in from my desktop machine and saw the grossest Twitter delivery ever! I wished I would have taken a screen shot before I fixed the problem, but just trust me – it looked bad.
What was weird is that on my laptop things looked fine. After some troubleshooting I realized that Twitter’s CSS is asking for the fonts it lists them in the following priority:
font: 0.75em/1.5 Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif
Yep, Helvetica – that font that looks beautiful on Macs but when misused looks like crap on PC’s. Sure enough, it looked horrible. I ended up comparing the configurations and noticed I had Helvetica (or a PC version of it) installed on my machine. After unloading the font Twitter looked normal once again.
I’m not sure if this font priority was a recent change, as I don’t bring up Twitter on my Desktop all too often, but I wanted to float this out there just in case anyone else’s Twitter looked like crap.