Tor Browser having weird font while other browser doesn't

I am using the Tor Browser on Linux, it is updated. But there is one problem, Tor Browser has a weird font (Times New Roman?) while the other browser on my computer, which is Brave doesn’t have that font and looks normal. If I want the Tor Browser’s font to look like the one on Brave, what do I have to do?

Tor Browser:
UPLOAD
Brave:
UPLOAD2

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Hi :slight_smile:

Tor Browser bundles all the fonts used (all on Linux, on Mac and Windows it’s almost all fonts are bundled). It does not use your system fonts at all. You can inspect an element (right click > inspect) and use the font inspector

It really depends on the character (and language if specified) as to the font used. The fonts for monospace, sans-serif and serif in Linux are Arimo, Cousine and Tinos (not sure which is which, I am not a font expert and not on linux right now)

Brave is not even a comparable browser since it’s based on blink. Tor Browser is built using gecko

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Arimo is sans-serif, metrics-compatible with Arial, Cousine is monospace, metrics-compatible with Courier New and Tinos is serif, metrics-compatible with Times New Roman (you can remember which one is which thanks to the initial).

Good sites will add generic names at the end of font-family (it seems the site you’re visiting doesn’t).
However, for bad sites, we’re planning of adding aliases from these MS font names to the alternatives we use (we can’t redistribute Microsoft fonts due to their license).
We’re still evaluating whether targeting 13.5 or 14.0 because fonts are fingeprinting 101 (but serious script will still be able to tell the difference between 13.0 and 13.5).
We might add Courier (not Courier New), Helvetica and Times as well, even though they aren’t perfect equivalent (but Windows also aliases Helvetica to Arial).
We are not considering to add other metric-incompatible aliases (e.g., Verdana, Tahoma, etc etc).

In any case, please don’t add other fonts to your Tor Browser, or it’ll be trivial to fingerprint you.

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So there’s no way to change the font for Tor Browser to look like Brave?

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So there’s no way to change the font for Tor Browser to look like Brave

There is, but you would radically alter your fingerprint

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Oh… ok!

Strange thing I found, if you install the TOR browser first (no browser
must be in the OS first), then the font looks normal (no Times New Roman
looking text).

But when you install the TOR Browser after you installed a browser in your
OS, it will give you the weird font in the picture.

Is this a bug maybe?

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Impossible to tell, because you need to use the font inspector and get the actual font name(s). Tor Browser doesn’t use ANY system fonts - it only uses the ones that come bundled in the Tor Browser fonts sub-directory

You start tor browser using this way - see How to start Tor Browser on Linux - #13 by PieroV

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@MustBeMe: how do you start Tor Browser?
It’s very important that you go through the start-tor-browser script/icon, not the firefox script and not the firefox.real binary.

Can you find a site that gives the results you don’t like it and share with us?

Installing another browser might install some dependencies that change fontconfig’s configuration.
But our script will override any system configuration to (try) to make all users look as similar as possible (with some asterisks, e.g., for fonts users will be similar only in the same OS, and on Windows/macOS there might be differences between OS versions, etc etc…).

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I reinstalled my OS and chose a different desktop enviroment a few days ago, there is a preinstalled browser. I reinstalled Tor Browser, then the fonts look normal now. I do not know what solved this, but all is good now.

Thank you guys for helping me!! :grin:

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You are right, even though this reply wasn’t a solution to my problem (which I already solved), doing this can make you stick out from the crowd.

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