962426 - Missing a Javascript interface for list of installed fonts in non-Chrome-privelige JS

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Firefox :: Untriaged, defect)

Description

[Luke]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Ubuntu; Linux x86_64; rv:26.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/26.0 (Beta/Release)
Build ID: 20131206145143

Steps to reproduce:

Try to Find a way to list user's installed fonts, from Javascript.


Actual results:

There is apparently no way to get a list of the users' fonts, except with a special Flash swf designed for this purpose.


Expected results:

There should be some method of getting the user-installed fonts, without having to do CSS tricks programmatically, looping over some list of fonts that may or may not include them all.

Even IE has a way to get all installed fonts that are usable for the browser:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3368837/list-every-font-a-users-browser-can-display

Comment 1

[Masatoshi Kimura [:emk]]

This is the deliberate decision to make the browser less fingerprintable.

Comment 2

[Luke]

It makes another dependence on Flash, though.

If the user-agent already shows what version of OS, Firefox, and other info, and web-page JS even has permissions to access the location of the user, why not let it get a list of fonts, that is very important to know which can be used in Canvas and other technologies?