1772370 - Google font weight in Windows 7 since v. 101.0

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

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

Description

[KG]

Attachment: FirefoxFontWeightIssue.jpg

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; Win64; x64; rv:101.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/101.0

Steps to reproduce:

Viewed a Wordpress site that had no changes before the latest Firefox update.

Actual results:

Since Firefox 101.0, Google font weights are rendering incorrectly (i.e. too light) on our WordPress sites, ONLY on Windows 7. All Windows 10 Firefox's are still displaying correctly. The issue has been noted specifically (but likely not limited to) with Rubik Medium 500, Raleway Semi-bold 600, and Open Sans.

We tested this on three different Windows 7 devices and three different Windows 10 devices. During troubleshooting on the original Windows 7 device, we also 1) ran Firefox in troubleshooting mode 2) cleared the cache for the specific websites 3) cleared the entire Firefox cache 4) refreshed Firefox.

Expected results:

Google font weights should be rendering correctly in Firefox on Windows 7 devices, as they do in Google Chrome on the same Windows 7 devices and on Windows 10 devices.

Comment 1

[BugBot [:suhaib / :marco]]

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 correct in case you think the bot is wrong.

Comment 2

[KG]

Attachment: FIREFOX2.jpg

Just noticed this on YouTube as well. Video titles are displaying with lighter weight than they should be. Example from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xxVtYSFaUx0

Comment 3

[KG]

Again, this is just on Win 7 computers.

Comment 4

[anrikun]

I confirm this bug. Same here.

Comment 5

[vladkosi]

Same bug on Windows 10 version 1511, Firefox 100.0.2, 101.0 and 102.0b3.

I suspect Google changed something, the fonts were rendering fine few days ago.

Comment 6

[01miki10]

Confirming this also occurs on Windows 8.1. Likely something on Google's end, because I started seeing this already before I had updated to Firefox 101.

Comment 7

[KG]

Confirming font weight is displaying correctly in Windows 10 Build 18363. For comparison, it is also working correctly in iOS 15.

Comment 8

[vladkosi]

Right now the fonts are rendering correctly with no changes to my system, so it was definitely on Google's end.

Comment 9

[Emilio Cobos Álvarez [:emilio]]

Okay, it seems like this wasn't a Firefox bug after all. Maybe they relied on some font technology that isn't available on Windows 7 (we render fonts using native APIs on Windows, I think Chromium bundles their own FreeType copy).

Comment 11

[KG]

Confirmed. Issue is resolved. Thank you.

Comment 13

[vladkosi]

Font weight is broken again since yesterday.