617009 - Fonts from fonts.com seem to be broken in Firefox 4

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Web Compatibility :: Site Reports, defect)

Description

[David Barrett]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10_6_5; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.19.4 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.3 Safari/533.19.4
Build Identifier: Firefox 4.0b7

Our fonts load fine on Firefox 3.6, Safari, and Chrome. They do not load on Firefox 4.0 beta 7 for some reason.

I don't know what other sites use fonts.com, but we do and it's happening there:

http://getexceptional.com/

We're using the JS loader, not the CSS-only loader. None of my dev tools (like Firebug) work in the beta, so I unfortunately can't provide more information.

David

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1.Visit http://getexceptional.com/ in Firefox 4.0 beta 7
Actual Results:  
Custom fonts do not load.

Expected Results:  
Expected custom fonts to load.

Comment 1

[Alice0775 White]

Regression window:
Works:
http://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/rev/40b1a49b7808
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:2.0b8pre) Gecko/20101006 Firefox/4.0b8pre ID:20101007011819
Fails:
http://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/rev/2fa4872fffeb
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:2.0b8pre) Gecko/20101007 Firefox/4.0b8pre ID:20101007021130
Pushlog:
http://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/pushloghtml?fromchange=40b1a49b7808&tochange=2fa4872fffeb

Comment 2

[Jonathan Kew [:jfkthame]]

The fonts (two faces of Frutiger Neue, it looks like) being used by getexceptional.com are blocked by the OTS font sanitizer. This almost certainly indicates that there is some kind of error or inconsistency in the font data; I've seen other cases where fonts.com fonts had incorrect checksums or a wrong version identifier in the 'head' table, for example, and this is probably a similar case.

I'd recommend reporting the problem to fonts.com and asking them to verify the integrity of their fonts, e.g. using the Microsoft Font Validator tool. Firefox is becoming more stringent about validating fonts before using them. (The latest update of FF3.6 is likely to show the same behavior, if there are errors in the font files.)

Comment 3

[Robert O'Callahan (:roc) (email my personal email if necessary)]

If it's the sanitizer, why would the fonts work in Chrome as indicated in comment #0?

Comment 4

[Jonathan Kew [:jfkthame]]

(In reply to comment #3)
> If it's the sanitizer, why would the fonts work in Chrome as indicated in
> comment #0?

Turning off the sanitizer (setting gfx.downloadable_fonts.sanitize = false) and reloading the getexceptional.com page confirms that it is OTS blocking the fonts.

The fonts.com javascript they're using does browser sniffing. I haven't tried to figure out everything it does, but it may well be serving different fonts/formats depending on the browser, which could easily lead to differing behavior.

Going to http://webfonts.fonts.com/en-US/Project/ChooseFonts?fontQuery=frutiger%20neue shows that lots of fonts from fonts.com *do* work in Firefox (with OTS), including many Frutiger faces; I don't know precisely which faces are being used on getexceptional.com, but it appears that something in how they're being packaged/delivered there is causing them to be rejected by the sanitizer.

Comment 5

[Robert O'Callahan (:roc) (email my personal email if necessary)]

OK.

Comment 6

[John Daggett (:jtd)]

fonts.com is serving different fonts to other browsers, if you change the user agent string to Chrome's UA string the fonts load fine.  It's failing at ots.cc, line 342, where it complains that the table offset if not 4-byte aligned.  Guessing this is an issue of poor WOFF construction.

Comment 7

[David Barrett]

I've forwarded this bug report to the fonts.com folks. Hopefully they'll be able to solve this issue on their end.

Thanks for looking into this. It seemed to be a browser bug at the time of submission.

Comment 9

[Karl Dubost💡 :karlcow]

It seems it is working now.
Frutiger is displayed correctly.