553513 - [WISHLIST] use sans-serif as the default font

Status: UNCONFIRMED

(Firefox :: Settings UI, enhancement)

Description

[Qianqian Fang]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.1.8) Gecko/20100214 Ubuntu/9.10 (karmic) Firefox/3.5.8
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.1.8) Gecko/20100214 Ubuntu/9.10 (karmic) Firefox/3.5.8

The default desktop font on modern Linux desktops is "sans-serif". Comparing with serif fonts, sans-serif fonts have simple contours and fairly uniform stroke thickness. This makes it very easy to read and comprehend on the screen. 

However, Firefox uses serif as the default webpage font. Although serif fonts looks nicer when you are making a print (or view on high-resolution media), but when viewing a webpage on the screen, it is not as clear as sans-serif. This is especially the case for Chinese fonts. Because Chinese Hanzi glyphs are dense in strokes, the serif decorations makes them even more difficult to read on the screen (they will be very blurry after AA, unless there are embedded bitmaps). Sans-serif Chinese fonts is far more superior for reading. I've also heard users of other languages complained about serif fonts as well, see 
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/468898

It would be nice to set sans-serif as the default web page fonts in Firefox.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. install firefox
2. browse a website where no fonts are specified
Actual Results:  
serif fonts are used to render the text

Expected Results:  
use sans-serif fonts for better contrast and reading speed