Lessons learned switching our web UI from stock fonts to a proprietary font (miksovsky.blogs.com)

AKA "Reverse Verdanagate".

Thanks for making the Web a more horrible place (step by tiny step)...

well as long as I can force my browser to use the system sans-serif font for all web pages, all is good

All that talk and not a single screenshot of what it looked like with the font change.

By default I shudder reading any article that suggests that a ustom font is a smart UI choice for web apps.

Almost without exception, custom font choices lead to broken designs, slow serving, and work against clean UI.

But this article fairly balances the joy of selecting a custom font, with the sheer litany of issues that come with proper integration: compatibility, hosting, licensing, sizing, etc.