The reaction of many designers seems to smell of elitism and subjectivism more than anything to me, but I'll be happily proven wrong.
Are designers commonly aware of why Arial exists. I presume many designers must understand the very strong business & licensing reasons for Microsoft to have developed this typeface.
Do many designers also understand the distinctly different approach to pixel alignment in display faces, which some people prefer while others prefer Apple's approach (I subjectively prefer Microsoft's approach).
It's easy to pile onto the I hate Microsoft and everything they touch bandwagon, but how much unbiased and objective research has been applied to the question of qualitative value to the target audience? Is an old typeface only good if it's designed by the Swiss?
Something is stinky here. There are so many subjective factors at play while the language surrounding debate rarely recognizes those factors.
[Update: As noted by DrJokepu below, Microsoft didn't develop the font originally. I think the underlying licensing and business considerations remain a similar discussion.]
Helvetica was built to live in a gridded world: the horizons and verticals of Swiss modernity (look again at R and see how space-consuming it is).
Arial was built to look like Grotesque 215, which is what swiss designers were using before Helvetica. Arial is supposed to be more human (read: humanist), and is for on-screen and on-paper --- not signage.
Designers prefer Helvetica because it is built to be used by designers; any combination of letters will pack neatly in space, both because of the letterforms themselves and the superior kerning.
Arial is meant to be used for less important, less permanent documents. It is more casual, and setting a whole page of text in it does not seem cold or callous.
I'm a designer and I'm not particularly (at least not inordinately) impassioned about things like this, but I do find it important to recognize the difference between _design_ and art. It's often less about subjective preferences and more about purposeful/thoughtful solutions—in this case, what constitutes acceptable typography.
For example the politics and business constraints surrounding the development, licensing, and use of Helvetica in the 90's are way more complex than simply saying, "Microsoft didn't want to pay for Helvetica", which is how many designers put it.
These complaints about licensing also, by the way, give away many of their visceral emotion-based reactions to Arial, rather than objective design purity. Clearly every party is affected in some way by the commerce of design, which often seems to inform designer's reactions too, especially when the licensing question is over-simplified.
Any feedback is appreciated.
Compare the popular typefaces from different platforms (Win/Mac/Lin) would also be very interesting
And for those without Mathematica: http://cronus.ws/~mta/fonts/FontCompareSource.pdf
People who don't know the difference, and can't articulate it, will /still/ know something is wrong, even though they can't put their finger on it.
About the film: Helvetica is a feature-length independent film about typography, graphic design and global visual culture. It looks at the proliferation of one typeface (which celebrated its 50th birthday in 2007) as part of a larger conversation about the way type affects our lives. The film is an exploration of urban spaces in major cities and the type that inhabits them, and a fluid discussion with renowned designers about their work, the creative process, and the choices and aesthetics behind their use of type.
Can't remember where I heard about it (possibly MetaFilter, or here?).
Clearly this is uninspired, much like a KDE theme trying to recreate Mac OS X. There's no actual law that says such a knock-off must be inferior to the original but a) it's off to a bad start, and b) even if it ties with the original it's got the taint of being a rip-off motivated by greed.
The full history of Arial, from a link someone else posted: http://www.ms-studio.com/articles.html
Note that Red Hat has in turn commisioned a font that is "metric compatible" with Arial: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberation_fonts
