4 ms·

firefox options -> language and appearance -> advanced -> uncheck 'Allow pages to choose their own fonts, instead of your selections above'

smt88 6y ago
Won't this break the UI of most sites because they (ab)use web fonts to add icons? It's annoying to hit a page with a video player, and all the buttons are little boxes with numbers in them because the icon font didn't load...
- test1235 6y ago
  for me personally, I've only noticed this problem once, but I can't remember which site that was (must be one I don't visit often), but obviously your browsing habits are different to mine. I don't see any disadvantages to giving it a try yourself for a while tho' - it's just a single checkbox setting.
  - smt88 6y ago
    I have tried it with uBlock (not Firefox's native setting), and it breaks a ton of mainstream sites.
- danielheath 6y ago
  “No web fonts for elements containing multiple characters” would be a great ublock rule, now I think about it...
  - jfk13 6y ago
    That'd break sites that use ligature-based icon fonts, with the actual content being an icon identifier like "thumbs-up" and an OpenType ligature rule in the font to render this as an icon glyph.
    - folmar 6y ago
      Could you just get the icon name in that case? For me it would be good-enough, or, in many cases, better than the crammed design-first icons (Slack, I'm pointing at you!).
      - jfk13 6y ago
        In theory, it's legible; but often, rendering the icon name (which may be up to a dozen letters or so) will totally break a layout that was designed to accommodate a single glyph.
    - danielheath 6y ago
      Ahh good point. Not sure if I have seen one of those used before; they seem to have a good fallback though.
- jfk13 6y ago
  It depends. In Firefox, disabling "Allow pages to choose their own fonts" does not completely block web fonts (as setting gfx.downloadable_fonts.enabled to false would); what it does is to prioritise the default fonts, and move any page-specified fonts to the end of the fallback list. This means that for "normal" text, the browser's default fonts will be used, but if there are Private Use Area character codes that are only supported by the site's custom webfont, it'll still get used for those. So icon fonts that are based on PUA code points will still work. What doesn't work in this scenario is when the icon font doesn't encode its icons in the PUA, but uses normal Unicode characters -- either symbol code points that are supported by the system's default fonts, or as some icon fonts do, regular English words that then use ligature rules to produce the icon glyphs. (So the icon font contains OpenType mappings such as "phone" -> [phone icon].) In this case the content on the page will end up rendered using the default font instead. [Edited: HN doesn't let me include an actual phone icon there, apparently.]
- ori_b 6y ago
  Very few sites do this, in my experience.

smt88 6y ago

Won't this break the UI of most sites because they (ab)use web fonts to add icons? It's annoying to hit a page with a video player, and all the buttons are little boxes with numbers in them because the icon font didn't load...

test1235 6y ago
for me personally, I've only noticed this problem once, but I can't remember which site that was (must be one I don't visit often), but obviously your browsing habits are different to mine. I don't see any disadvantages to giving it a try yourself for a while tho' - it's just a single checkbox setting.
- smt88 6y ago
  I have tried it with uBlock (not Firefox's native setting), and it breaks a ton of mainstream sites.
danielheath 6y ago
“No web fonts for elements containing multiple characters” would be a great ublock rule, now I think about it...
- jfk13 6y ago
  That'd break sites that use ligature-based icon fonts, with the actual content being an icon identifier like "thumbs-up" and an OpenType ligature rule in the font to render this as an icon glyph.
  - folmar 6y ago
    Could you just get the icon name in that case? For me it would be good-enough, or, in many cases, better than the crammed design-first icons (Slack, I'm pointing at you!).
    - jfk13 6y ago
      In theory, it's legible; but often, rendering the icon name (which may be up to a dozen letters or so) will totally break a layout that was designed to accommodate a single glyph.
  - danielheath 6y ago
    Ahh good point. Not sure if I have seen one of those used before; they seem to have a good fallback though.
jfk13 6y ago
It depends. In Firefox, disabling "Allow pages to choose their own fonts" does not completely block web fonts (as setting gfx.downloadable_fonts.enabled to false would); what it does is to prioritise the default fonts, and move any page-specified fonts to the end of the fallback list. This means that for "normal" text, the browser's default fonts will be used, but if there are Private Use Area character codes that are only supported by the site's custom webfont, it'll still get used for those. So icon fonts that are based on PUA code points will still work. What doesn't work in this scenario is when the icon font doesn't encode its icons in the PUA, but uses normal Unicode characters -- either symbol code points that are supported by the system's default fonts, or as some icon fonts do, regular English words that then use ligature rules to produce the icon glyphs. (So the icon font contains OpenType mappings such as "phone" -> [phone icon].) In this case the content on the page will end up rendered using the default font instead. [Edited: HN doesn't let me include an actual phone icon there, apparently.]
ori_b 6y ago
Very few sites do this, in my experience.