1850715 - Firefox font list not representative of installed fonts

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

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

Description

[robtom_5]

Attachment: mozillabug.png

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:109.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/116.0

Steps to reproduce:

Installed firefox on a debian system (without helvetica installed) and navigated to a website that requests the helvetica font (e.g. motorsport.com')

Issue can also be seen by navigating to settings and viewing available font options

Actual results:

Page attempts to use helvetica font despite it not being installed. Computed also reports mac and ubuntu in font-family

Expected results:

Firefox should not be reporting Helvetica as installed, nor attempting to provide it to websites

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

[Jonathan Kew [:jfkthame]]

The computed value of font-family simply reflects what was specified in the page's CSS; it does not indicate anything about what fonts are present, or will actually be used.

It's possible that the fontconfig setup provides a substitute for Helvetica, such as Nimbus Sans, in which case Firefox should respect that when Helvetica is requested in CSS.

To determine which font Firefox is ultimately using for an element, you can look in the Fonts panel of the Inspector (see the drop-down arrow at the right-hand edge, beyond Layout / Computed / Changes / etc). What does this show for the content in question?

Comment 3

[robtom_5]

This reports it is using Helvetica

Excerpt of the full text:

Helvetica:familylang=en:style=Regular:stylelang=en:fullname=Helvetica Regular:fullnamelang=en:slant=0:weight=80:width=100:pixelsize=14:foundry=Adobe:antialias=False:file=/run/host/fonts/X11/100dpi/helvR10-ISO8859-1.pcf.gz:index=0:outline=False:scalable=False:charset=0 20-7e a0-ff:lang=aa|ay|bi|br|ch|da|de|en|es|eu|fj|fo|fur|fy|gd|gl|gv|ho|ia|id|ie|io|is|it|lb|mg|nb|nds|nl|nn|no|nr|oc|om|pt|rm|sma|smj|so|sq|ss|st|sv|sw|tl|ts|uz|vo|wa|xh|yap|zu|an|fil|ht|jv|kj|kwm|li|ms|ng|pap-an|pap-aw|rn|rw|sc|sg|sn|su|za:fontversion=0:fontformat=PCF:decorative=False:postscriptname=Helvetica:color=False:symbol=False:variable=False:fonthashint=False:order=0

Comment 4

[Jonathan Kew [:jfkthame]]

OK, the system does have a Helvetica font installed, apparently as part of an X11 bitmap fonts package... specifically, at

/run/host/fonts/X11/100dpi/helvR10-ISO8859-1.pcf.gz

(and probably other files for other sizes/DPI values...)

So that's what is being used when the page style specifies Helvetica.

Comment 5

[robtom_5]

That file does not exist, moreover fc-list | grep Helvetica has nothing in it.

Comment 6

[Jonathan Kew [:jfkthame]]

Is your Firefox installed as a snap package (or flatpak or something like that), rather than directly from a Mozilla tarball? If so, I believe that package provides a separate runtime environment, virtual filesystem, etc., and that must be where the Helvetica font is present. What you see outside of the snap/flatpak/??? environment does not reflect what the application sees when it runs within that env.

Comment 7

[David Shin[:dshin]]

(bug 1850715 comment 6 seems to be missing the ni? for the reporter)

Comment 8

[Jonathan Kew [:jfkthame]]

Marking S4 for now; I think this is not really a Gecko bug, but confusion arising from the different environment used by some kind of packaged version of Firefox, but it would be good to get confirmation of exactly what configuration is being used (comment 6). Possibly this should be reclassified as an issue with the specific package.

robtom_5, if you could confirm what type of Firefox installation you're using, that would be helpful - thanks!

Comment 9

[BugBot [:suhaib / :marco]]

A needinfo is requested from the reporter, however, the reporter is inactive on Bugzilla. Given that the bug is still UNCONFIRMED, closing the bug as incomplete.

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