1607057 - Fonts suddenly became ugly

Status: UNCONFIRMED

(Core :: Layout: Text and Fonts, defect, P3)

Description

[Aravindan]

Attachment: Screenshot

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:73.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/73.0

Steps to reproduce:

I don't know what I did. Suddenly, I notice that my firefox fonts have changed. I was installing some icon fonts, as I'm setting up my computer, but I don't know what exactly cause this change. But now, the font used for the webpage titles in the tabs, the font used in the address bar, and the fonts used in twitter and WhatsApp have changed to the same (ugly) font. I tried changing lots of fonts in about:preferences, but none if it seems to have any effect. I also tried setting fonts at ~/.config/fontconfig/fonts.conf, but it has no effect. I'm on Arch Linux with bspwm, if it matters. Please help!

Actual results:

The font changed unexpectedly. This font is wide and ugly.

Expected results:

The font shouldn't have changed.

Comment 1

[Emilio Cobos Álvarez (:emilio)]

Does this reproduce on older firefox versions? For example, does it happen if you use mozregression to use e.g. Firefox 70 like:

$ mozregression --launch 70

?

If not, is there any chance you could run:

$ mozregression --good 70

To find which change broke it in Firefox if any?

Comment 2

[Aravindan]

How do I install mozregression on arch?

Comment 3

[Emilio Cobos Álvarez (:emilio)]

pip install --user mozregression should do, or sudo pip install mozregression to do it globally.

Comment 4

[Aravindan]

I tried pip install --user mozregression, but then the mozregression command doesn't exist.

Comment 5

[Emilio Cobos Álvarez (:emilio)]

Should be in ~/.local/bin, you gotta add that to your $PATH, I think.

Comment 6

[David Baron :dbaron: (⌚️UTC-4, no longer working on Mozilla)]

Could this be the result of bug 1604761?

Comment 7

[Aravindan]

:dbaron I don't think so.
:emilio yes, the issue also seems to be in firefox 70. I figured out that it's using the Bitstream Vera font, which is why it looks like this, but it's not changing in some websites even after changing firefox's settings and fontconfig. Here's a screenshot on firefox 70.

Comment 8

[Cameron McCormack (:heycam)]

Jonathan, any clues here?

Comment 9

[Jonathan Kew [:jfkthame]]

I suspect that one of the icon-font/emoji-font packages that the reporter has installed is inserting fontconfig rules that force the use of Bitstream Vera in cases where the user doesn't really want to see it (and describes it as an "ugly" font). I've seen examples of things like this:

  <match target="pattern">
    <!-- If the requested font is sans-serif -->
    <test qual="any" name="family">
        <string>sans-serif</string>
    </test>
    <!-- Make Bitstream Vera Sans the first result -->
    <edit name="family" mode="prepend_first">
      <string>Bitstream Vera Sans</string>
    </edit>
    <!-- Followed by Twitter Color Emoji -->
    <edit name="family" mode="prepend_first">
      <string>Twitter Color Emoji</string>
    </edit>
  </match>

(excerpted from https://github.com/eosrei/twemoji-color-font/blob/master/linux/fontconfig/56-twemoji-color.conf).

Installing a font package that has fontconfig fragments like this could explain the "unexpected" fonts the reporter is seeing. The solution in that case is to remove the offending package or modify the fontconfig configuration files to not override default fonts like this.

So I think this is probably a font configuration issue, not a Firefox bug.