Search Support

Avoid support scams. We will never ask you to call or text a phone number or share personal information. Please report suspicious activity using the “Report Abuse” option.

Learn More

Website fonts not being recognized / displayed correctly

  • 4 replies
  • 1 has this problem
  • 17 views
  • Last reply by cor-el

more options

Fonts won't be correctly recognized by Firefox and text is then displayed garbled (see attached example). I use Firefox 89.0.1 (64-bit) on a MacBook Pro.

I've tried the following to fix this: I've cleaned out my cache and cookies. In Preferences/Languages/Fonts I've changed the san-serif type to Arial (helped some but not all); I've unchecked and then checked again "Allow pages to choose their own fonts, instead of your selection above." I've started looking at the html code to figure out the font settings but I really just need to have a functioning brower.

Any thoughts? I'd be very grateful. It's impacting my work, and I'm having to use other browers, which function without issues - but I like Firefox! This is a bummer. Thanks!

Fonts won't be correctly recognized by Firefox and text is then displayed garbled (see attached example). I use Firefox 89.0.1 (64-bit) on a MacBook Pro. I've tried the following to fix this: I've cleaned out my cache and cookies. In Preferences/Languages/Fonts I've changed the san-serif type to Arial (helped some but not all); I've unchecked and then checked again "''Allow pages to choose their own fonts, instead of your selection above''." I've started looking at the html code to figure out the font settings but I really just need to have a functioning brower. Any thoughts? I'd be very grateful. It's impacting my work, and I'm having to use other browers, which function without issues - but I like Firefox! This is a bummer. Thanks!
Attached screenshots

All Replies (4)

more options

We have seen reports that this can be caused by a problem with fonts like Roboto or Helvetica.

You can right-click and select "Inspect Element" to open the builtin 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 Font 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.

more options

Hi Cor-el!

Thanks for your response. Spot on, it seems to mostly happen with Helvetica that I've noticed.

And correct, I can inspect the page - that's what I meant with looking at the html code; sorry for my clumsy description - but that doesn't solve my problem. I don't want to have to Inspect Elements and make changes every time a webpage isn't displaying correctly; that becomes tedious really fast.

So... sounds like it's a known problem without a good solution right now? Thanks! Shirine

more options

Is this font installed in a non default location with the result that is might not be included in the directories that Firefox is permitted to access from within the sandbox ?


more options

See also:

  • 1662983 - Roboto web font not rendering properly

(please do not comment in bug reports
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/page.cgi?id=etiquette.html
)