Since today I have ugly text formatting in brave search results viewed on firefox

Brave Search
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Description of the issue:
I use brave search as my daily search engine on firefox on windows 8.1. Today I noticed that text formatting is bugged. Text is really thin and does not use formatting (there is no bold text at all). In brave it looks fine (thicker text in general and some parts are in bold).

Brave on windows 8.1. Normal text with some text in bold:

brave win 8
brave win 81920×1080 354 KB

Firefox on windows 8.1. Thin text with no text in bold, different spacing than on brave:

firefox win 8
firefox win 81920×1080 361 KB

I compared my firefox font settings to different PC with win 10 but they have same font settings despite different PC displaying results properly. I then rebooted to win 10 on my main win 8.1 pc (I have 2 systems) and launched brave. I did not observe this issue, same as on different PC. I can even say that on win 10 firefox had thicker text than brave.
Brave on windows 10. Normal text:

brave win 10
brave win 101920×1080 429 KB

Firefox on windows 10. A bit thicker but still normal text, same spacing as on brave:
firefox win 10
firefox win 101920×1080 443 KB

So I assume this is related to windows 8.1.
This worked fine until yesterday, so you probably pushed some brave search update.

Brave Version (check About Brave): this post is about brave search site, not browser!

Operating System: Windows 8.1

1 Like
2

Thanks for reaching out about this.
I’ve informed the Search team about this — not sure if its a known issue or not. Do you by chance have another chromium based browser (MS Edge, Chrome, etc) you can test this behavior in?

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I installed edge on win 8.1 to test this. It looks like it works fine in edge too. So seems like firefox problem :confused:

edge win 8
edge win 81920×1080 366 KB

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Thank you for the update. We’re looking into whether or not this is something we need to address or if the issue is with Firefox itself.

7

After entering inspector on firefox I can see that browser is supposed to use poppins and manrope.
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It looks like it is using manrope extra light. Maybe this is the reason there is no bold?

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21691×845 199 KB

When I untick main-font browser switches to something like times new roman and is properly applying bold to some fragments

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31861×901 189 KB

1 Like
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The thin font is Manrope Extra Light which is a terrible text font for reading paragraphs on a screen. An extra light font is better for headline or display purposes. The stylesheet for Brave Search needs to be modified to remove Manrope Extra Light as the default search font and replace it with a standard San-Serif HTML default. I had to switch my search engine to DuckDuckGo because of the dreadful legibility issue of an extra light font. Too bad.

1 Like