The fonts built into modern browsers are varied – it is hard to avoid loading your own fonts. Arial is the rare exception – it is well supported across all old and modern browsers. It looks a little different between Windows and Mac / iOS especially as a larger bold heading. On Android, it is substituted by Roboto. On Linux variants, Arial will likely fall back to the sans-serif system font.

Verdana is also well supported but looks a bit odd in this day and age.

You could instead go with the system font on each platform (eg, San Francisco for Mac/iOS, Segoe UI for Windows, Roboto for Android, etc). However, this means that every platform will look a little different, especially for larger and heavier font styles. Personally I like San Francisco and Roboto (and they look fairly similar). However, I find Segoe UI in large and heavy looks quite different and unsuitable for a “serious” website. If you could use Roboto on Windows reliability, this approach would be better.. but Roboto is only included with Edge but not Chrome on Windows.

So basically, if you want a “serious” looking sans-serif font that is similar across platforms, then it’s either Arial OR it’s time to load your own font and take the performance penalty in return for the look and consistency across platforms.

Google Fonts is a good place to get a font to self host. You can then convert the downloaded ttf with woff2compress (also available on brew) to make it a smaller download and host as a woff2. The woff2 format is now supported by all modern browsers.