Linux – How to change the font in Chrome or Firefox

arch linuxchromefirefoxfonts

I'm using Arch Linux with i3 window manager, and Chrome and Firefox seem to be the only things that won't take the GTK font that I've selected. When I try to change the font in either browser, it still looks the same.

Because it's happening in both browsers, I'm assuming I have some global font configured that is overriding my changes. How do I fix this?

Best Answer

The menu fonts should change based on your GTK font, but the font used in web pages is a combination of firefox settings and fontconfig.

To change the setting in Firefox for example, go to Edit > Preferences > 'Content' tab > and click the 'Advanced' button next to 'Default font'. Here you can change the setting for various languages.

If you want to see which font actually gets used for a particular setting in Firefox you can check with the command line: fc-match -s FONT_NAME

This shows the fallback order too, so if characters are missing from the first one in the list then the next font in the list will be used, and so on. If you want to change this order you can look up how to modify the fontconfig for your Linux distribution, where there are options for system-wide configuration as well as per-user configurations via a file like ~/.config/fontconfig/fonts.conf

If you want to verify your settings in Firefox you can visit a page, right click some text and select "Inspect Element", click the "Inspector" tab, and then click the "Fonts" tab in the smaller window on the right. This will show all fonts being used by firefox for a particular element.

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How to make chrome (stop asking to be) the default browser

For Chromium, when I choose "Don't ask again", Chromium stores the following setting in my ~/.config/chromium/Profile 1/Preferences file:

{
   "alternate_error_pages": {
      "enabled": false
   },
   "apps": {
      "shortcuts_have_been_created": true
   },
   "autofill": {
      "negative_upload_rate": 1.0,
      "positive_upload_rate": 1.0
   },
   "bookmark_bar": {
      "show_on_all_tabs": true
   },
   "bookmark_editor": {
      "expanded_nodes": [ "1" ]
   },
   "browser": {
      "check_default_browser": false,
      [...]

For standard Google Chrome:

Close Chrome.
In Terminal, paste open ~/Library/Application Support/Google/Chrome/Default/Preferences (and then hit enter)
search for "browser":{ and replace it with "browser":{"check_default_browser":false,

When you start chrome back up it shouldn't prompt you anymore.

Note:

The preferences setting seems to differ substantially between chrome versions. On Chrome-78.0 the setting

"browser":{"default_browser_infobar_last_declined":"13236762067983049"}

seems to work. I assume it simulates clicking the x.

Debian – How to fix Fontconfig error: failed reading config file

Have a look at /etc/fonts/conf.avail and /etc/fonts/conf.d . I came across this question because I had the same problem. Finally

FC_DEBUG=1024 fc-cache 2>&1|less did not tell anything helpful. So I ran the following command looking for missing configuration files.

FC_DEBUG=1024 strace fc-cache 2>&1|less

It turned out that the configuration file from the fonts-guru-extra package was messed up. It was stored as /etc/fonts/conf.avail/65-0-fonts-guru-extra.conf/65-0-fonts-guru-extra.conf and the symlink from /etc/fonts/conf.avail/65-0-fonts-guru-extra.conf was somehow broken. At least it was not a file.

So I ran dpkg --force-depends --purge fonts-guru-extra and dpkg complained about a non-empty directory /etc/fonts/conf.avail/65-0-fonts-guru-extra.conf I deleted this directory by hand and ran

apt-get install fonts-guru-extra

and afterwards the error message was gone.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

How to make chrome (stop asking to be) the default browser

Debian – How to fix Fontconfig error: failed reading config file

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