this post was submitted on 08 May 2026
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Privacy
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What the fuck why is my browser telling random websites what fonts I have installed? Shouldn't that be completely irrelevant to everyone except me and my particular device?
It should be, yes. But browsers like Chrome are literally made by the company that stands to profit from fingerprinting you, so they're always going to be made to make it easy to do just that. Firefox at least has “resist fingerprinting” option which apparently can limit font visibility to only base system fonts rather than fonts you installed and language-pack fonts. LibreWolf has this on out of the box.
Thats part of how you’re fingerprinted.
So it can know which fonts it can use and your device would be able to display them?
Why doesn't it just let the site display whatever it wants and let me worry about the issue of whether they display properly
The site could also be set to display whatever font it wants but also set to list standard fonts that also work which the browser can then choose from on the user's end if the user doesn't have the first choice font. That way you the user don't have to worry about it and there is no way to fingerprint by the browser just handing out an entire list of fonts installed on the user's system. There are plenty of ways to make things like this work, but the incentive is to keep them as they are or to increase uniqueness so people can be more easily fingerprinted.