Firefox: Improve readability by allowing exceptions to font enforcement

[shreepads]

Most websites enforce the use of their own fonts and, to be honest, most of them are not great for readability.

Fortunately there is an excellent font that I've been using, Atkinson Hyperlegible (developed by the Braille Inst, see https://brailleinstitute.org/freefont ) that is very well designed (in terms of looking good while being very readable). And of course Firefox (unlike Chrome, Edge) allows me to force sites to use this font for all Sans-Serif text via the settings, leading to very readable on-screen text. (I've also set it up as my system font and it works a treat)

The one fly in the ointment is the use by websites of the Material Symbols font (see https://fonts.google.com/icons https://developers.google.com/fonts/docs/material_symbols ) which is a series of glyphs identified by names (instead of codepoints) that represent icons e.g. "<span class="material-symbols-outlined">search</span>"

Naturally when I force Atkinson Hyperlegible on sites that use such content, it is rendered as the text "search" instead of the icon packaged as a font file. Not great!

So to the idea - in the Advanced font settings, when a user de-selects "Allow pages to choose their own fonts, instead of your selections above", allow the user to specify fonts that should not be replaced e.g. "'Material Symbols Outlined" and "Material Symbols". If this sounds too complicated to do in the UI, then allow users to set this list via about:config instead (although mostly for power users).

I realise this is asking Firefox to fix an issue caused by sites (either because they use the Material Symbols font for convenience or are unwilling to respect the user's font choices) but would much appreciate a fix.

Thanks!

[Jon]

Thanks for submitting an idea to the Mozilla Connect community! Your idea is now open to votes (aka kudos) and comments.

[jfkthame]

This was recently implemented in https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1363454 (should be shipping in Firefox 111).

[Jon]

Hey all,

Good news...

This was shared with our internal teams, and we're happy to report back that it will be delivered in Firefox 111. Check out @jfkthame's post in this thread for more info.

[tomkay]

Override page fonts but allow exceptions

It is great that Firefox allows one to choose preferred fonts for rendering web pages.

However, more and more web pages use special characters from special fonts to realise UI elements such as arrows, question mark icons, etc.

Ticking "Allow pages to choose their own fonts, instead of your selections above" in the Firefox settings will result in the correct rendering of those UI elements but obviously also respects the web page's font choice for normal text.

It would be idea if one could specify one's preferred font for normal text, while allowing special fonts to be used on the page. This could be realised in various ways:

1. Allow the user to specify a list of font exceptions, i.e., fonts that will not be replaced by the user preferred font choice. Typical examples are "Symbol", "Wingdings", etc.

2. Allow the user to specify fonts that should be replaced by the user's preferred font choice. Typical examples are "Garamond", "Times", etc.

3. Have a fixed set of special fonts that will not be replaced by the user's preferred font choice.

I have no strong preference for any of the above alternatives.

[Jon]

(Note: a similar idea has been merged into this thread)

[shreepads]

Outstanding, great work! Just saw the Bugzilla thread at it was fixed almost exactly on the day I submitted the idea, I guess there are no new ideas 😀

Am thinking of submitting a similar idea for Firefox on Android/ iOS i.e. first allow specific font enforcement and then the exception list, but I'm sure someone has already submitted a bug/ idea for that!