[_heimdall]

Its interesting that Firefox would offer a feature that disables all custom fonts rather than simply prioritizing the user's preferred font.

It does add a bit of performance gain not loading the fonts, and it may be a small security improvement, but if the goal was usability/readability that seems like a huge miss.

[hnlmorg]

A preference based system would be almost impossible to maintain considering the literal infinite number of type faces out there (thousands plus more built every week).

Add to that, this feature also needs to be understandable for non-technical people who might never have view a page source in their lives.

Much as a granular system would be more powerful and preferable for the HN community, having a dumb toggle makes a lot more sense from Firefox’s perspective.

[_heimdall]

I wasn't thinking granular control. It could work exactly like the existing preference with users picking a preferred font. That font is always set as the highest priority font and used for any characters it supports, but the page's custom fonts are still fallbacks and kept in the font stack for any characters missing from the user font.

This would be helpful for icon fonts, but also for user preferred fonts that don't cover all language character sets.

[hnlmorg]

Oh I see. Is that not how it works already?

Apologies if I’ve completely misunderstood your comments

[alpaca128]

No, using this setting in Firefox blocks all fonts site by a website, which means if a site uses an icon font the website UI will look very broken. I am not a fan of icon fonts.

[_heimdall]

No problem at all! I haven't been by my desktop the last couple days but I do want to test it. I hope that's already how it works, that would make more sense to me than blocking all custom font loading (though that does have its purposes).