Which monospace font does a browser use?

css, fonts, webfonts

Solution

There are 5 generic families that can be used: "serif", "sans-serif", "cursive", "fantasy", and "monospace". When a browser sees one of those, it asks the operating system for the default font in that family.

Thus, which font a web browser uses is OS-dependent.

See Mozilla's documentation on `font-family` for details.

Problem

With CSS, if you specify `font-family: monospace;`, my understanding is that the browser chooses its default/preferred monospaced font. If that's correct, how can you determine which monospaced font your browser is using?

Original source