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Firefox 4.0.1 shows almost all the text in bold. I start up in save mode and its fine but when I disable all the addon's then boot in normal mode it's broken again.

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So I upgraded last night, this morning I notice that a lot of the text on websites are in a bold font. For example when doing yahoo web mail unread messages should be bold while read messages shouldn't be, now they are all bold no matter what. I started in safe mode thinking an addon was broken and everything looking normal which seemed to confirm that. So I manually disabled all the addon's and restarted in normal mode, the problem was back.

I confirmed that all the addon's were still disabled and restarted in safe mode again, fixed... so I disabled both the plugin's and extensions... still broken in normal mode. At one point I thought it might be the default Appearance so I downloaded the one that looks like 3.6 and loaded that one... still broken.

So this is what I'm wondering, what is not loaded in safe mode that is still loaded when you manually disable all extensions and plugin's?

So I upgraded last night, this morning I notice that a lot of the text on websites are in a bold font. For example when doing yahoo web mail unread messages should be bold while read messages shouldn't be, now they are all bold no matter what. I started in safe mode thinking an addon was broken and everything looking normal which seemed to confirm that. So I manually disabled all the addon's and restarted in normal mode, the problem was back. I confirmed that all the addon's were still disabled and restarted in safe mode again, fixed... so I disabled both the plugin's and extensions... still broken in normal mode. At one point I thought it might be the default Appearance so I downloaded the one that looks like 3.6 and loaded that one... still broken. So this is what I'm wondering, what is not loaded in safe mode that is still loaded when you manually disable all extensions and plugin's?

Saafara biñ tànn

This could be a problem with the new font-related features that try to use your graphics card. You can turn those off here:

Tools > Options > Advanced > [uncheck] "Use hardware acceleration when available"

(That's one of the things Safe Mode turns off.)

I don't know whether you would see the results immediately, or whether you have to restart Firefox.

Jàng tontu lii ci fi mu bokk 👍 9

All Replies (5)

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Saafara yiñ Tànn

This could be a problem with the new font-related features that try to use your graphics card. You can turn those off here:

Tools > Options > Advanced > [uncheck] "Use hardware acceleration when available"

(That's one of the things Safe Mode turns off.)

I don't know whether you would see the results immediately, or whether you have to restart Firefox.

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That was it, I turned all the addon's back on and turned this off everything is fine, just to make sure I turned the feature back on and it broke again.

I would never have figured that one out, thanks!

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I suddenly have this problem too - I upgraded quite a while ago, and everything was fine, but a couple a days ago this problem showed up out of the blue. Hadn't installed any add-ons, fiddled with any settings, nothing. Have tried the above solution, didn't work. In fact, nothing I do with the fonts options seems to have any effect. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

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@amandacath, sorry for the inconvenience, but can you start a new question with your system information and add-ons listed?

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Hi there - I'm having similar bold text issues with a customer's instance of Firefox 5.0.1 running on Windows 7, Home Premium, SP1 on a Lenovo laptop. There are two issues to be exact:

  1. text that is supposed to be normal weight appears bold
  2. some text has an incorrect amount of spacing (padding/margin) around it

These symptoms appear only on this one machine and appears to be fine in Firefox 5.0.1 across at least 3 other machines running Win 7 as well as all other browsers (IE, Chrome, Safari) we've tested in across a variety of platforms.

I've attached an image with a side-by-side comparison of the normal view next to the broken view as it appears on this specific machine.

I've tried unchecking the hardware acceleration option and restarting Firefox - did not work.

I've also tried running Firefox in Windows XP compatibility mode (as suggested here: http://www.groovypost.com/howto/how-to/repair-the-google-and-gmail-bold-font-issue/) - did not work.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks.

Gaurav Bhatnagar moo ko soppali ci