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B S Magnet

macrumors 601
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After all the time I’ve spent on here these last several years, I feel I ought to know the culprit behind oddball font rendering of web pages encoded in non-Western/Unicode fonts.

But this one has me stumped. (Or else my brain is falling apart.)

Take, for instance, an old, questionably-formatted page whose character encoding call-out in the <html> page tag is "ko", or Korean, but with mixed Latin characters:

1668429415686.png



On Mozilla-based browsers running 10.6.8 and later, the page renders as one might expect:
1668428539657.png


Yet, on Mozilla-based browsers (TFF, Interweb-PPC, etc.) running 10.5.8 or earlier (or, heck, even 10.6 SL-PPC), the same page renders as this (or some variation thereof):
1668428616770.png


After eliminating discrepancies in system fonts between major versions of OS X (Korean fonts are part of Leopard, just as they are with later OS X releases), what am I missing here? Do older Mozilla code bases have fundamental issues with mixed character usage that prevent correct rendering of the occasional old web page with peculiar language/encoding call-outs?
 
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wicknix

macrumors 68030
Jun 4, 2017
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Wisconsin, USA
What happens if you choose your own default fonts and disable the websites fonts?
  • Tools > Options > Content : Fonts & Colors > Advanced
  • [ ] "Allow pages to choose their own fonts, instead of my selections above"
 
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B S Magnet

macrumors 601
Original poster
What happens if you choose your own default fonts and disable the websites fonts?
  • Tools > Options > Content : Fonts & Colors > Advanced
  • [ ] "Allow pages to choose their own fonts, instead of my selections above"

1668504363826.png

Nice. It renders legibly — even if not how the web page intended to render it, font-wise.

I wonder why the browser isn’t able to render as the web page calls for.

On the same token, I’ll need to figure out the syntax for an about:config string to render this particular web site to be overridden by system fonts, as having system fonts for other web sites isn’t exactly desirable rendering behaviour.
 

Amethyst1

macrumors G3
Oct 28, 2015
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11,490
I always tell Firefox to use Lucida Grande as default font and disable website fonts. I just love it when everything uses the same font I guess.
 

B S Magnet

macrumors 601
Original poster
I guess its just habit for me to disable website fonts as a very generic security measure. Ever heard of font fingerprinting? It can also speed up page loading on slower devices.

I had, yes, but given how old the code in these browsers are, and given how low a consumer priority I am, coupled with always using uBlock origin and uMatrix to miss those targeted ads, it’s never ranked as a high priority for my own security. Should a server admin decide to fingerprint browsers to hone in that I’m using a PowerPC Mac running a Mozilla-based browser in OS X, then well, golly-jeepers: I doubt I’m going to rank high in their target market (unless they sell PowerPC Mac parts or sslt).

I say the above somewhat half-seriously, as fingerprinting (as a security measure) generally pales as a concern against, say, brute-force measures (i.e., when software-as-a-service is hacked and millions of logins are made vulnerable), IP tracking/spoofing, key logging, or older “personalization” measures (i.e., cookies or tracking pixels).

Moreover, as a former web site developer/designer (back when one developed them, by hand, from scratch, i.e., Web 1.0/1.5), I still prefer to use Web fonts on my own extant sites as part of overall look and feel (as well as legibility for stuff like body text). So overriding a site’s fonts as a universal setting for all sites I visit isn’t preferred personally (but I totally understand why this would be a different prioritypreference for other folks).

So I’m left with one outstanding question:

Even as I opt to override fonts for a particular site on Interweb-PPC or TFF in order to render it legibly on screen, why does the rendering depart so significantly on Interweb-PPC, TFF, IceWeasel) running on PowerPC — versus, say, the more correct rendering I’m able to see when running any of Interweb, Spiderweb, Nightly, or Arctic Fox, on an Intel Snow Leopard Mac? Something fundamental differs between those Mozilla code bases, but I don’t know what those differences are.
 

wicknix

macrumors 68030
Jun 4, 2017
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Wisconsin, USA
Might just be the difference between releases? 45 is quite a ways behind 52/60. Just out of curiosity, do your page fonts render properly in RetroZilla? My only reason for asking is that RZ is 99% untouched mozilla code, where TFF (and its forks) had lots of hacks and work-a-rounds added and some features were removed (plugin support comes to mind) to build/run on 10.4/10.5.
 

B S Magnet

macrumors 601
Original poster
Might just be the difference between releases? 45 is quite a ways behind 52/60. Just out of curiosity, do your page fonts render properly in RetroZilla?

On the site/page in question, RetroZilla handles the display correctly (note: it’s not my site, but one I’ve relied on partly as a reference on the SL-PPC project).

Below I’ve overlaid RetroZilla running over my usual Interweb-PPC default browser on 10.6, mostly to show the differences in how they render. The RetroZilla preferences are all default, as this was my first-ever run of it on this Mac. (Note: the rendering results remain the same even if I have TFF, in lieu of Interweb-PPC, running in the background and RetroZilla running in the foreground):

Picture 7.png

My only reason for asking is that RZ is 99% untouched mozilla code, where TFF (and its forks) had lots of hacks and work-a-rounds added and some features were removed (plugin support comes to mind) to build/run on 10.4/10.5.

Given the above, it leaves me to ponder whether there was something Cameron might have tweaked long ago in a departure from base Mozilla code, which all subsequent TFF builds and Interweb-PPC builds inherited, consequently. If early Mozilla base code renders the page without trouble (the page dates back to around 2010 or 2011), and Mozilla-based code for 10.6 and later renders the page/site correctly, then this might suggest there is something unique in the TFF branch.
 
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