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New update made the font settings completely ineffective & suggestions regarding the settings

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  • Last reply by Kaitaras

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Hello!

I am contacting you because of a problem related to font settings. Your latest update (which apparently rolled in to me earlier today) completely messed up my font settings. I am aware that you made the change "The visibility of fonts to websites has been restricted to system fonts and language pack fonts in Enhanced Tracking Protection strict mode to mitigate font fingerprinting." which seems to be behind this issue - I am indeed using the Enhanced setting and system fonts like Times New Roman work just fine. Also, for a while now, any font settings are not working in private mode.

I have been using Firefox first and foremost specifically for the reason that I could manipulate font settings more effectively than in any other browser and force websites to show fonts that I assign to them. There are many reasons to that: I deal with many languages and scripts (including their historical variants). Also, I get migraines very easily, and for some weird reason, sans serif fonts tend to be hard to read / strainingh for my eyes and may trigger them, so I try to force serif fonts to any and every script I need. This current update made it completely ineffective - INCLUDING your own website and this support site as well!

Also, in some instances, like in case of Arabic, Devanagari or Greek text, sometimes the font doesn't change because it was probably labelled under another language. Is the setting language-specific or script-specific? Sometimes I noticed that, for example, English Wikipedia about Devanagari script shows Devanagari fonts properly but if I switch Wikipedia to Hindi or some other language using the script, it may revert to the original. I'm sorry that the examples are vague - because of the update I cannot really test them out for more specific details...

My question is, could you somehow preserve the updates you made to ETP but also allow us to force fonts the way we did before? Would it be possible to force them in the private mode as well? That would be perfect, because otherwise I would have to either lower security settings (which I really don't want to do) or completely migrate to some other browser that allows me to do this (but also undermines security since Firefox is pretty much the best in this regard).

A suggestion though. It would be wonderful if you could include more scripts into the list, beyond the most essential that you have now... like Coptic, Church Slavonic, Gothic, Ancient Egyptian and so forth. Ideally, the more Unicode scripts covered, the better.

Another suggestion. I mentioned migraines because of random visual triggers. Another really frustrating and much worse trigger occurs with many very old websites, which tend to have very bright and "piercing" hues of colors, like very pure yellow background with black text. It's so bad that most of the time I simply have to close the site immediately. Is there any way to do something like you do with fonts, but for background colors? Way back in time I looked for some extensions for this but they didn't really provide much flexibility, typically just offering a dark mode or similar. Most of the time for me it would be enough to simply change the background color to some more broken / slightly darker hue. For example, this very website has bright white background. Right now, coupled with sans serif, it's very hard for my eyes, but it would be a lot better if I could change the white to, like bright beige (and a serif font of course).

I am sure this is a very niche issue and I might even be the only one having issues with this - I'm sorry about that... But, like I said, tweaking fonts and especially forcing them is, in my opinion, one of the best and most amazing features in your browser (among many other features of course).

Thank you for your time and patience, and I apologize for the lengthy text. I will be looking forward to hearing from you and hopefully seeing these issues fixed.

Hello! I am contacting you because of a problem related to font settings. Your latest update (which apparently rolled in to me earlier today) completely messed up my font settings. I am aware that you made the change "''The visibility of fonts to websites has been restricted to system fonts and language pack fonts in Enhanced Tracking Protection strict mode to mitigate font fingerprinting.''" which seems to be behind this issue - I am indeed using the Enhanced setting and system fonts like Times New Roman work just fine. Also, for a while now, any font settings are not working in private mode. I have been using Firefox first and foremost specifically for the reason that I could manipulate font settings more effectively than in any other browser and force websites to show fonts that I assign to them. There are many reasons to that: I deal with ''many'' languages and scripts (including their historical variants). Also, I get migraines very easily, and for some weird reason, sans serif fonts tend to be hard to read / strainingh for my eyes and may trigger them, so I try to force serif fonts to any and every script I need. This current update made it completely ineffective - '''INCLUDING''' your own website and this support site as well! Also, in some instances, like in case of Arabic, Devanagari or Greek text, sometimes the font doesn't change because it was probably labelled under another language. Is the setting language-specific or script-specific? Sometimes I noticed that, for example, English Wikipedia about Devanagari script shows Devanagari fonts properly but if I switch Wikipedia to Hindi or some other language using the script, it may revert to the original. I'm sorry that the examples are vague - because of the update I cannot really test them out for more specific details... My question is, could you somehow preserve the updates you made to ETP but also allow us to force fonts the way we did before? Would it be possible to force them in the private mode as well? That would be perfect, because otherwise I would have to either lower security settings (which I really don't want to do) or completely migrate to some other browser that allows me to do this (but also undermines security since Firefox is pretty much the best in this regard). A suggestion though. It would be wonderful if you could include more scripts into the list, beyond the most essential that you have now... like Coptic, Church Slavonic, Gothic, Ancient Egyptian and so forth. Ideally, the more Unicode scripts covered, the better. Another suggestion. I mentioned migraines because of random visual triggers. Another really frustrating and much worse trigger occurs with many very old websites, which tend to have very bright and "piercing" hues of colors, like very pure yellow background with black text. It's so bad that most of the time I simply have to close the site immediately. Is there any way to do something like you do with fonts, but for background colors? Way back in time I looked for some extensions for this but they didn't really provide much flexibility, typically just offering a dark mode or similar. Most of the time for me it would be enough to simply change the background color to some more broken / slightly darker hue. For example, this very website has bright white background. Right now, coupled with sans serif, it's very hard for my eyes, but it would be a lot better if I could change the white to, like bright beige (and a serif font of course). I am sure this is a very niche issue and I might even be the only one having issues with this - I'm sorry about that... But, like I said, tweaking fonts and especially forcing them is, in my opinion, one of the best and most amazing features in your browser (among many other features of course). Thank you for your time and patience, and I apologize for the lengthy text. I will be looking forward to hearing from you and hopefully seeing these issues fixed.

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I didn't even realize this would be a public post - I thought it would be private and only for the staff, so apologies for too much information etc!