GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 664915
Uses serif instead of sans serif fonts on several websites
Last modified: 2015-03-19 10:30:20 UTC
I just did a fresh installation of Fedora 16 and then installed Epiphany. I did not change anything in the configuration of Firefox and Epiphany (Epiphany's default on F16 is to use the system fonts) and visited the same website with both of them. I observed that Epiphany incorrectly used serif fonts while Firefox used sans serif fonts as it should. Screenshots are attached. Is this Epiphany's fault or Fedora's fault, and should I report in the Redhat Bugzilla instead?
Created attachment 202234 [details] Epiphany using incorrect fonts
Created attachment 202235 [details] Firefox using correct fonts
Isn't this a direct consequence of bug 644523?
Yeah. I have double checked (Fedora 15, Firefox 8) and the default font for Firefox is indeed 'serif', so perhaps this is a bug in WebKit or Epiphany in that we don't respect the web page desires for the default font or something. Can you confirm you have "serif" as the default font in the Firefox config dialog?
Yes, confirmed.
With version 3.4.x of Epiphany I've noticed improvement in that Wikipedia pages are rendered identical to Firefox now (previously it used a different font than Firefox). But the website I showed in my first two attachments, the news website of the Dutch public broadcasting nos.nl, is still rendered incorrectly. I will upload screenshots showing how the most recent Epiphany 3.4.x renders it compared with the latest Firefox. I don't remember the exact version numbers, but the screenshots were made on an installation of the Fedora 17 beta which was fairly up to date. Both browsers didn't have any preferences altered. The good news is, other than nos.nl I haven't seen any other websites which are rendered incorrectly by Epiphany so far.
Created attachment 213171 [details] The nos.nl website rendered by Firefox
Created attachment 213172 [details] The nos.nl website rendered by Epiphany
(In reply to comment #8) > Created an attachment (id=213172) [details] > The nos.nl website rendered by Epiphany I see no difference in the rendering of nos.nl here. Both use a sans-serif font, regardless of whether I use system fonts or not. (Mageia Cauldron, Epiphany 3.4.1).
On Fedora 18 with Epiphany 3.6.1 and Firefox 18.0 this bug still affects me. I still have to test this with another recent Linux distro, but can we at least confirm this bug now?
Finally took the time to try another Linux distro, it's the same on openSUSE 12.3 beta 1: serif fonts in I visit nos.nl with Epiphany, but Firefox displays the proper sans serif fonts. Could this bug please be confirmed now that it's obvious it is not limited to Fedora?
We don't really use the confirmed/unconfirmed thing in bugzilla, but thanks for verifying that this is not a fedora only issue.
I just tested again with the Fedora 20 alpha and can confirm the problem still persists. I changed the version in this bug to 3.10 accordingly.
cnn.com is a prominent example of a site that has serif fonts in epiphany but sans serif in Firefox.
Hi; nos.nl has been redesigned, so there's no longer any way to reproduce this bug, unless you have an updated test case? Keep in mind that different font choices are not necessarily a bug. I just resolved another identical bug report that turned out to be the site falling back from "arial" to "serif"....
Sorry for replying late. This problem isn't as bad as it used to be, but I can still give one example: http://knmi.nl/ Note that the links in the top bar "Home", "Weer", "Klimaat" and so on use serif fonts in Epiphany 3.14.2 but use sans serif in other browsers such as Firefox 35.0.1.
OK, thanks for finding another link. On that site I see the following on line 508 of rijksvinkstyle.css: .header .nav_main { font-family: Arial; font-size: 12px; font-weight: bold; list-style: none; margin: 0; padding: 0 24px; display: block; line-height:1.48; width: 742px;} That means "Arial, and only Arial and nothing but Arial, and if your system doesn't have Arial then your default font" which for all sane browsers is serif, so they're getting exactly what they requested. Firefox's font matching is clearly different: they might have a hardcoded match from Arial to sans, or they might allow fontconfig to match Arial up to another font on the system (which we only allow for generic fonts like "sans-serif" or else the web developer has no control over font fallback). The fix would be something like this: .header .nav_main { font-family: Arial, sans-serif; ... }
Thank you Michael, I've sent the webmaster of the knmi.nl website a notice about the error and how they can fix it.