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Garbled font in Firefox on macOS Monterey (12.6.1)

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  • 36 views
  • Last reply by Gutenberg

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Hello :)

I'm using Firefox 107.0 on macOS 12.6.1 and I'm having weird issues with the displayed font. It appears on the startup screen of Firefox and on websites (see screenshots attached).

The garbled font is called ".SF NS".

I've tried turning the option "Allow pages to choose their own fonts, instead of your selections above" on and off without success.

I have also tried enabling and disabling hardware acceleration - also without luck.

The issue does **not** appear in safe mode. Unfortunately resetting the theme and disabling all extensions hasn't helped either :(

I have also downloaded and installed a font called "SFNS Display" but the issue persists.

Uninstalling Firefox (with AppCleaner) and reinstalling hasn't fixed the problem.

I don't know what else to try. Can someone help me please? :)

Hello :) I'm using Firefox 107.0 on macOS 12.6.1 and I'm having weird issues with the displayed font. It appears on the startup screen of Firefox and on websites (see screenshots attached). The garbled font is called ".SF NS". I've tried turning the option "Allow pages to choose their own fonts, instead of your selections above" on and off without success. I have also tried enabling and disabling hardware acceleration - also without luck. The issue does **not** appear in safe mode. Unfortunately resetting the theme and disabling all extensions hasn't helped either :( I have also downloaded and installed a font called "SFNS Display" but the issue persists. Uninstalling Firefox (with AppCleaner) and reinstalling hasn't fixed the problem. I don't know what else to try. Can someone help me please? :)
Attached screenshots

Chosen solution

All Replies (7)

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You can check in Font Book for font issues like corrupted and duplicate fonts. You can try to identify the font that causes the problem.

You can right-click and select "Inspect" to open the built-in Inspector with this element selected.

You can check in the Rules tab in the right panel in the Inspector what font-family is used for selected text. You can check in the Fonts tab in the right panel in the Inspector what font is actually used because Firefox might be using a different font than specified by the website.

Modified by cor-el

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Thank you for your answer! I think we're getting closer.

The font used is a system font called ".SF NS".

I turned off "Allow pages to choose their own fonts, instead of your selections above" and changed the fonts firefox uses to SF Pro, SF Mono and New York. This fixes the issue on many websites. However when a website contains something like

   font: caption;

the text is displayed garbled again.

When I open firefox in safe mode, it also uses ".SF NS" but without any issues!! Can I somehow influence which system font firefox chooses?

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Note that you shouldn't disable "Allow pages to choose their own fonts, instead of your selections above" as this will cause issues with iconic fonts used by webpages to display small icons (you may see text labels instead of icons).

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Ok, so firefox chooses to use the system font ".SF NS" which is garbled when executed in non-safe mode. It must have something to do with safe mode then?

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Chosen Solution

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The bug report shows that you had several copies of this font in other locations ?

Didn't Font Book detect and report this or haven't you tried this ?

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Yes same filename with different content in different locations was the problem. I checked every font in Font Book for duplicates and because I knew SFNS was causing problems, I even checked that one multiple times - no duplicates were found!