Helvetica is a fine default choice. So is Arial or verdana or any other "boring" font.
I'll go one step further and claim that the times i visited a website where the selected fonts actually improved over browser defaults can be counted on one hand.
I learned page layout in the 90s, and have by virtue of the time period, committed acts of typography tantamount to war crimes. As such, I have self-imposed a lifetime ban on “getting clever” with fonts. My one exception is Computer Modern, which I strategically use as a geek shibboleth.
Language support used to be huge: I shipped web fonts for years so things would render accents and non-English characters correctly or at all. Dropping Windows XP was joyous.
These days I generally agree except for things like logos or games, or specialized applications like the dyslexia-friendly fonts. It’s hard to beat rendering immediately for most uses.
One one project we had to cram a lot of text into a columnar UI. A UI that would be used in meetings on a projector.
So we had everyone stand at the back of a medium sized conference room and do a poor man’s eye exam. Verdana had the smallest font that was still readable. Narrower font means less line wrapping and text clipping. None of us knew any font lore so I didn’t learn until much later that this was a design goal of Verdana, but I’d say mission accomplished.
Corporate tools at headquarters didn’t like it, and with no context demanded we change it back to a “normal” font. Apparently I’m still upset about this.
I teach Chemistry and have come to rely on Trebuchet MS. It has good readability even at the back of the classroom and it’s capital I, lowercase l, and number 1 are all distinct. You’d be surprised how common students are confused by Carbon and Iodine (CI) vs Chlorine (Cl) for example.
YMMV but I found Verdana to be a perfect font for my Kindle.
Granted, it's a Kindle Touch, I don't know if I would choose it again on one of the newer models (not that I would buy one, Amazon's locking up of those models makes a thriving homebrew scene impossible).
I don't necessarily like verdana, but it is a very legible font for small font sizes. I happen to like a lot of information on my screen, and I keep font sizes low. For a long time Verdana was my default font for the web.
I'll go one step further and claim that the times i visited a website where the selected fonts actually improved over browser defaults can be counted on one hand.