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My browser continues to show weird symbols instead of words

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  • Amsa ta ƙarshe daga zeroknight

phil210
phil210
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my browser continues to show symbols instead of words. I troubleshot the font issue and it does not seem to be that. this is on a macbook pro and the browser is updated. I deleted the browser and reinstalled it. which worked for a day but then everything went back to showing symbols. it is intermittent in that sometimes it will show the real words and then a few hours later is will show this.

my browser continues to show symbols instead of words. I troubleshot the font issue and it does not seem to be that. this is on a macbook pro and the browser is updated. I deleted the browser and reinstalled it. which worked for a day but then everything went back to showing symbols. it is intermittent in that sometimes it will show the real words and then a few hours later is will show this.
Hoton allon fuska da aka liƙa

All Replies (3)

cor-el
cor-el
  • Moderator
  • Top 10 Contributor
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See this recent thread about font issues on Mac:

cor-el
cor-el
  • Moderator
  • Top 10 Contributor
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This is a font issue on Mac and we have seem quite a few such reports over time.

See also this bug report.

  • 1803406 - [macOS] Text rendering issues when users have multiple fonts which internally use the same name, and the OS chooses differently among them for different Firefox processes

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

On the Firefox Home page in the second screenshot you should be able to right-click this weird text and open the Inspector. There you can open the Fonts tab in the right panel to see what font Firefox is using.

You can right-click and select "Inspect" to open the built-in 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 Fonts 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. If the Fonts tab is hidden, click the down arrow at the right end.

zeroknight
zeroknight
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Workarounds include:

  • Uninstall old or unused fonts.
  • Identify the garbled font with devtools inspector (Cmd+Opt+C) and uninstall it.
  • Go to about:config and change gfx.e10s.font-list.shared and gfx.font-list-omt.enabled to false then restart the browser.