798199 - Loading a URL pointing to a font file (.ttf, .otf, etc.) on firefox android should offer the possibility to place that font into user profile directory for use in rendering text with missing font on Android system

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(Firefox for Android Graveyard :: General, defect)

Description

[Mathieu Pellerin]

Since bug 619521 landed, firefox for android will populate and use fonts located in the user profile directory.

To fully benefit from this and allow the users to easily make use of this enhancement, it would be nice of firefox android automatically offers users the possibility of place a font loaded via URL (i.e. http://mydomain.com/myfont.ttf) into the user profile directory.

Comment 1

[Jonathan Kew [:jfkthame]]

If we do this (which I think is potentially a great idea), we should probably also have some kind of UI available to let the user see what fonts they've added, and the ability to remove them.

Comment 2

[Mathieu Pellerin]

Jonathan, yep; could quite naturally fit into the add-on window (i.e. one font being listed as one ad-on, with the possibility of removing the said font).

Comment 3

[Mathieu Pellerin]

Added bonus of going down that road is that user isn't presented with a new piece of UI nor is he / she presented with a new metaphor. Since language packs are listed in add-ons, individual fonts wouldn't look odd there.

Comment 4

[Jonathan Kew [:jfkthame]]

One more thought: Before offering to add a newly-downloaded font to the profile for use by the browser, perhaps we should run it through the opentype sanitizer, to give users some protection against installing bad/malicious fonts (just as we validate fonts loaded via @font-face before actually using them).

If we do want to validate font files before installing, we'll need the platform to expose a font-sanitizing API for front-end code to use. Currently, the sanitizer is just hooked up directly to the @font-face support in platform, but this would be an entirely different codepath.

Comment 5

[BMO Automation]

We have completed our launch of our new Firefox on Android. The development of the new versions use GitHub for issue tracking. If the bug report still reproduces in a current version of [Firefox on Android nightly](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.mozilla.fenix) an issue can be reported at the [Fenix GitHub project](https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/fenix/). If you want to discuss your report please use [Mozilla's chat](https://wiki.mozilla.org/Matrix#Connect_to_Matrix) server https://chat.mozilla.org and join the [#fenix](https://chat.mozilla.org/#/room/#fenix:mozilla.org) channel.