No text on some websites in Firefox
Some websites display no text at all. This is unlike earlier reports (e.g. https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1011611?esab=a&as=aaq) where there was some text. There is also no text in the tabs, menu bar or search box.
I am on Windows, and everything was fine before the Firefox update.
I have tried disabling and reenabling hardware acceleration. Other programs are handling fonts without issue.
This reminds me of a bug I reported back with Firefox 4, I think, where there were issues with font formats. However, as far as I can make out, it’s OpenType and TrueType fonts that aren’t appearing, whereas that time it was an issue with Postscript Type 1.
One of the sites with no text is Facebook.
This appears to be happening only on Windows, not on Mac. I haven’t checked on Ubuntu yet.
Chosen solution
Cor-el, it took hours of editing fonts, restarting the computer, deleting profiles, installing and reinstalling Cyberfox (a 64-bit version of Firefox), looking at gfx settings, but the solution is this:
turn on hardware acceleration, restart your browser.
I must have turned it off a while back after reading some advice somewhere, so when Firefox went to v. 32, it kept that preference and nuked my text. After turning it back on (not easy, as the Firefox menus and options displayed no text!), the text came back.
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Is the text there, but only not visible (can you copy and paste the text elsewhere)?
This can be a problem with the font that is used to display the text.
You can do a font test to see if you can identify corrupted font(s).
You can try different default fonts and temporarily disable website fonts to test the selected default font.
- Tools > Options > Content : Fonts & Colors > Advanced
- [ ] "Allow pages to choose their own fonts, instead of my selections above"
Hi Cor-el: thanks again! You are always on the ball.
The text is there, but not visible.
The fonts aren’t corrupted, but I have narrowed it down to an incompatibility in Firefox with PostScript Type 1 with your Danish link for some of the pages that I remember. They are the ones displaying in my default. It doesn’t quite explain the bug on Facebook but we are one step closer.
I realize PS1 fonts are obsolete but I had expected there to be backwards compatibility as there had been before.
This was a known issue in Firefox many years ago that was originally fixed (in Bugzilla), but it appears it has been broken again with the update. I’ll update the Bugzilla thread as it might help the developers.
Chosen Solution
Cor-el, it took hours of editing fonts, restarting the computer, deleting profiles, installing and reinstalling Cyberfox (a 64-bit version of Firefox), looking at gfx settings, but the solution is this:
turn on hardware acceleration, restart your browser.
I must have turned it off a while back after reading some advice somewhere, so when Firefox went to v. 32, it kept that preference and nuked my text. After turning it back on (not easy, as the Firefox menus and options displayed no text!), the text came back.
It would still be worth to do a font check to see if they are all working OK. With hardware acceleration enabled Firefox may be using a different font.
You can do a font test to see if you can identify corrupted font(s).
Thanks, Cor-el. Firefox definitely isn’t displaying in a different font with hardware acceleration turned on. But it does have a problem with PostScript Type 1, which was something developers accidentally broke back in 2011 and was eventually fixed. It appears that same thing was broken again and may have affected the few people who choose to use legacy fonts which work with almost every other program in Windows.
I’ve found the test on that page has some issues detecting non-corrupt, multiple-weight fonts that are not PostScript (e.g. Open Sans), but they’re not the culprit here as they are not set to be used in my Firefox.
Modified by Jack Yan