1756278 - Japanese kanji renders as Chinese kanji

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

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

Description

[krmetcalf76]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:97.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/97.0
Firefox for Android

Steps to reproduce:

Firefox 97 (and past versions) render Japanese kanji text as the Chinese version.

This happens on Firefox for Linux (Pop!_OS and Arch), macOS, and Android.

Actual results:

For example, on the webpage https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E6%96%87%E5%8C%96 , the title 文化 is in Chinese on the browser tab title, but in Japanese on the webpage itself. If you toggle Reader View, all instances are in Chinese. The differences can be noted in that the top of the 文 is strictly vertical in Japanese but slanted in Chinese, and the right side of the 化 goes through the character in Chinese but not in Japanese.

This also happens on YouTube and other sites where Firefox is responsible for the font rendering. For example, see Kaori Sakamoto's name at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2dFwcSMwJrM .
When I Inspect the font on the Wikipedia page on Arch Linux, it is Noto Sans CJK JP. JP stands for "Japanese."
When I Inspect the font on the YouTube page on Arch Linux, it is Noto Sans CJK SC. SC stands for "Simplified Chinese."

These issues do not happen on Google Chrome.

Expected results:

Japanese kanji should be rendered for Japanese text.

Comment 1

[BugBot [:suhaib / :marco/ :calixte]]

The Bugbug bot thinks this bug should belong to the 'Core::Layout: Text and Fonts' component, and is moving the bug to that component. Please revert this change in case you think the bot is wrong.

Comment 2

[Jonathan Kew [:jfkthame]]

In the case of Kaori Sakamoto's name at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2dFwcSMwJrM, the content isn't tagged as being Japanese-language, as far as I can see, and so there's no reliable basis for choosing between Japanese and Chinese fonts for the kanji characters there. In the absence of any other hints, Firefox defaults to the Chinese versions. (If you add Japanese to the the "preferred languages" for web pages in about:preferences, for example, it'll take this as a hint to favor Japanese fonts in cases like this.)

The title of the wikipedia page https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E6%96%87%E5%8C%96 is a different case, because here the page is tagged with lang=ja, and so normally Firefox should choose Japanese font prefs. However, it seems that in Reader View, the title is presented without a lang attribute, and so then it falls back to a Chinese font. (The main content of the page still has lang=ja and displays correctly.)

Comment 3

[krmetcalf76]

Adding Japanese to the preferred languages in about:preferences worked, thank you. It also now appropriately loads Wikipedia Reader Mode in Japanese. The YouTube link with Kaori Sakamoto is now also in Japanese.
Thank you for your assistance.