A bit of context (I didn't get what this was at first):

"Google Web Fonts is an awe­some source of free, open source fonts hooked up to a world-class CDN. It’s also, sadly, filled with one-off nov­elty fonts vying for the title of “the new Comic Sans.”

"I quickly dis­cov­ered that a good met­ric for higher-quality fonts was the pres­ence of at least one alter­nate. The Google Web Fonts direc­tory does not allow that type of fil­ter­ing, so I built this sim­ple one-off page that allows you to browse multi-variant type­faces."

From here: http://somadesign.ca/2011/better-google-fonts/

I still don't get the point of this. I see the utility of seeing multiple fonts at once, but I'm sure there is a more subtle point. Because web designers want font families, not just fonts, what does this even mean?

He's saying that fonts that have multiple weights/styles are also fonts that are more likely to be higher quality.

Personally, I would use this tool to find a font that could be used throughout the page for different elements: such as body text, heading text, quotations, etc. The alternative would be to mix and match different fonts, but this takes a lot more effort and experimentation.

This. I am trying to only use FOSS fonts, also for print, so having families matters even more to me. I actually went through the while directory and sorted it by hand just last month, so this service will prove invaluable next time i need to choose fonts for any project, especially cross-media.

Thanks for the explanation.

A very useful round of editing of Google's webfont directory with a simple and uncluttered, "everything at a glance" interface. Awesome!

Anyone know why it renders poorly on Windows Chrome? Looks beautiful in IE9.

Ubuntu Mono seems to still be missing, unfortunately.

Hm... for me it's there

direct link: http://www.google.com/webfonts/specimen/Ubuntu%20Mono

I thought about http://somadesign.ca/demos/better-google-fonts/ but it's there too, just in a separate family. Thanks.