The person who wrote this article asserts that these fonts are “very much similar” to Times, Arial, and Courier, respectively. However, Times and Tino would never be categorized together (except that they are both serif fonts, but hey, there’s about a 50-50 chance of that). Cousine is also quite different from the typewriter-esque Courier.
Edit: As lambda points out, they have compatible metrics, so there shouldn’t be cases where layouts meant for one of {Times New Roman, Arial, Courier New} “break” by having content overflows on Chrome OS. (The team has also set up aliases for these relationships, besides setting the default "serif", "sans-serif", and "monospace" fonts.) Cool!
They are "very much similar" only in that they have compatible metrics. Thus, text typeset in Times, Arial, and Courier won't have to re-flow when using Tino, Arimo, and Cousine. You're absolutely right; the style of the fonts is quite different than the style of the one's they are intended to replace.
From the font info for Arimo:
Unique name Ascender - Arimo
Copyright Digitized data copyright (c) 2010 Google Corporation.
Trademark Arimo is a trademark of Google and may be registered in certain jurisdictions.
Description Arimo was designed by Steve Matteson as an innovative, refreshing sans serif design that is metrically compatible with Arial™. Arimo offers improved on-screen readability characteristics and the pan-European WGL character set and solves the needs of developers looking for width-compatible fonts to address document portability across platforms.
License Licensed under the SIL Open Font License, Version 1.1
Edit: As lambda points out, they have compatible metrics, so there shouldn’t be cases where layouts meant for one of {Times New Roman, Arial, Courier New} “break” by having content overflows on Chrome OS. (The team has also set up aliases for these relationships, besides setting the default "serif", "sans-serif", and "monospace" fonts.) Cool!
Direct links follow:
Issue & related commits on Chrome OS: http://code.google.com/p/chromium-os/issues/detail?id=5287&#...
Download the fonts: http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2010/09/download-and-use-the-new-...