1578798 - Font weight is incorrect in Scripting.com

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Core :: Layout: Text and Fonts, defect)

Description

[richb.hanover]

Attachment: FF-vs-Chrome-Font-Weight.jpg

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.12; rv:69.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/69.0

Steps to reproduce:

Using FF 69.0 (64-bit) and Chrome 77.0 and Safari on macOS 10.12.6, I view the site http://scripting.com

Actual results:

The headline font weight "SCRIPTING NEWS" is too light in Firefox. It is as expected (heaver) in both Chrome and Safari.

(Note: On Win10, FF, Chrome and IE look the same - as expected). Thanks!

Expected results:

Same font weight across all browsers.

Comment 1

[Andrei Purice]

Hello,

I have tried to reproduce this issue using the following versions of Firefox : release 69.0, FF 68.0, FF esr 68.0.2, FF beta 70.0b4 and Nightly 71.0a1 (2019-09-08) in comparison to Chrome, and they all looked the same. Used the same window size for all 6 and they all had the same font and color.
Can you please re-test it while in Safe Mode ? You can find helpful info here : https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/troubleshoot-firefox-issues-using-safe-mode .
Also can you re-test while using a new profile? You can find more about creating a new profile here : https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/troubleshoot-and-diagnose-firefox-problems#w_6-create-a-new-firefox-profile .
If possible, you can test this issue on the nightly build as well. Download the build from : https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/nightly/all/ .

Comment 2

[Jonathan Kew [:jfkthame]]

It's bold (as expected) for me on macOS 10.13. However, checking the font resources used by the page, I see that it's loading a variation font for the Oswald font-family used in that headline. The same resource is loaded multiple times with different descriptors:

@font-face {
  font-family: "Oswald";
  src: url("https://fonts.gstatic.com/s/oswald/v24/TK3iWkUHHAIjg752GT8Gl-1PKw.woff2") format("woff2");
  font-style: normal;
  font-weight: 400;
  unicode-range: U+0-FF, U+131, U+152-153, U+2BB-2BC, U+2C6, U+2DA, U+2DC, U+2000-206F, U+2074, U+20AC, U+2122, U+2191, U+2193, U+2212, U+2215, U+FEFF, U+FFFD;
}

@font-face {
  font-family: "Oswald";
  src: url("https://fonts.gstatic.com/s/oswald/v24/TK3iWkUHHAIjg752GT8Gl-1PKw.woff2") format("woff2");
  font-style: normal;
  font-weight: 700;
  unicode-range: U+0-FF, U+131, U+152-153, U+2BB-2BC, U+2C6, U+2DA, U+2DC, U+2000-206F, U+2074, U+20AC, U+2122, U+2191, U+2193, U+2212, U+2215, U+FEFF, U+FFFD;
}

Note that these two @font-face rules use the exact same URL. They're relying on the font-weight descriptor to be applied to the variation font in order to give the bold variant.

However, we don't support variation fonts on macOS versions earlier than 10.13, because the underlying support in Core Text was unreliable. (I'm a bit surprised it works in Safari on a 10.12 system, but perhaps fixes/workarounds have been incorporated into Apple's webkit code?)

At this point, we don't have any plans to fix this for older macOS versions; the feature simply isn't supported there.

Ideally, Google Fonts would be checking for variation font support and serving separate Regular and Bold faces to browsers that don't have variation support. (Indeed, when I load the page in IE11 on Windows, two separate Oswald resources are used.)

Comment 3

[richb.hanover]

Hello Andrei,

Thanks for the good suggestions, which I have tried with no success. (You also gave excellent instructions. I used to do tech support, and I recognize a good troubleshooting procedure when I see one.) Neither Safe Mode, New Profile, or the Nightly Build changed the appearance of the font weight.

To be clear, I am reporting the difference in font-weight between "SCRIPTING NEWS" text in the two images, not the layout difference (one line vs two lines).

I have broadened my testing to include various other computers.

• My Macbook Pro Mid-2012 with macOS 10.12.6 - FF (all versions tried, including Safe Mode, New Profile and Nightly Build) - font is light
• My wife's MacBook Air Mid-2011 with macOS 10.10.5 - FF 68.0.2 & 69.0 - both show light font
• My ancient MacBook Pro (early 2008) with macOS 10.11.6 - FF 67.0.4 & 69.0 both show the light font
  But...
• Parallels container running macOS 10.14.6 with FF 69.0 - FONT IS HEAVY as expected
• All Win10 browsers (FF, Chrome, Safari, IE, Edge) - FONT IS HEAVY as expected

When did this change? I don't remember exactly when, but maybe six or eight months ago. I noticed it immediately after downloading a new (developer? don't remember) version of Firefox. I had been using FF for quite a while (and reading scripting.com daily) when I noticed the change. I figured it was a bug, and that it'd get fixed, so I didn't take the time to report it.

Many months later, this is still occurring so I figured I would make the report.

Thank you again for looking into this.

Comment 4

[richb.hanover]

However, we don't support variation fonts on macOS versions earlier than 10.13, because the underlying support in
Core Text was unreliable. (I'm a bit surprised it works in Safari on a 10.12 system, but perhaps fixes/workarounds
have been incorporated into Apple's webkit code?)

At this point, we don't have any plans to fix this for older macOS versions; the feature simply isn't supported there.

This is a fantastic answer. It totally fits with my evidence.

Leave this as "Won't Fix" - I was simply reporting it because I suspect you operate on the rule: "We promise not to fix it if we don't know it's broke..."

Thanks!