1505650 - Disabling "Show web fonts" broken on Firefox 62, on Android phones with Roboto font replaced

Status: NEW

(GeckoView :: General, defect, P5)

Description

[nyanpasu64]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Ubuntu; Linux x86_64; rv:64.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/64.0

Steps to reproduce:

Uncheck Settings/Advanced/Show web fonts
Update Firefox from 61 to 62.0.3 (this is a regression).


Actual results:

All web fonts are shown.
- For example, thedailywtf.com renders Open Sans.


Expected results:

No web fonts are downloaded or shown.

Comment 1

[nyanpasu64]

Only happens when I use Magisk to replace Android system Roboto files with Fira Sans (overwriting the Roboto filename with First).

https://github.com/gloeyisk/FiraSans-Font
Android 7.0, Moto g5+ stock, Magisk 17.1.

Comment 2

[nyanpasu64]

Was there a deliberate decision to remove Clear Sans and use Roboto as the sams-serif font?

Comment 3

[nyanpasu64]

Apparently Clear Sans was removed due to https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1392147

Another issue: On older versions of Firefox, replacing Roboto TTF with a different TTF mapped the Google search bar to Noto CJK. Starting on Firefox 62 and later, many more websites have this font (which looks nice but has ugly faux bold).

Comment 4

[nyanpasu64]

Will Firefox be fixed to not crash and burn on phones with Roboto replaced? Some websites (like Gitlab issues list) render in an unusable font with enormous space characters, and white emoji-style numerals unreadable on white backgrounds.

Comment 5

[Jan Henning [:JanH]]

If you're replacing system fonts I think you're on your own here.

What you might be able to do, though, is to adjust the various font.name-list.sans-serif.* prefs in about:config to include the real name of your replacement font instead of Roboto (or in addition to, especially if you didn't replace all possible font style/weight-combinations with a custom font) - I think the name you need is what you find under Naming table -> fontFamily in the metadata inspector.

Comment 6

[Stefan Deiac]

Due to the lack of additional information from the reporter I'll close this issue as Worksforme, If someone can provide more information about this issue, please feel free to reopen the ticket and let us know all the information, thanks.

Comment 7

[Stefan Deiac]

Sorry for my mistake, the correct resolution of this bug is Incomplete.

Comment 8

[nyanpasu64]

Yes, I used replaced the system Roboto font with Fira Sans using Magisk and https://github.com/gloeyisk/FiraSans-Font which reuses the roboto .ttf names. And changing about:config solved the issue.

But why does Android Chrome, along with other Android apps, not have this problem at all? Do they look up fonts by .ttf name instead of by database lookup?

Comment 9

[Jan Henning [:JanH]]

Replacing system fonts affects other GeckoView-based apps, too, so we should decide whether this is something we want to handle or not.

Comment 10

[Chris Peterson [:cpeterson]]

Are there non-rooted Android devices that ship without Roboto or ship some other font spoofing as Roboto? We would accept a patch, but this bug is a very low priority because it is an unusual device configuration made by the user.

Comment 11

[Jan Henning [:JanH]]

We were caught out by some phones (Pixel phones?) apparently officially using Google Sans instead of Roboto, see bug 1529673. So it's a bit less than ideal that we have to take manual action whenever Google (or in theory some other OEM, too) decides to start shipping a new standard system font, but as long as this doesn't happen too often, I guess it's indeed not worth the effort.