Firefox Menu fonts

[Jeff]

I've been playing with installing Vista for the first time tonight, and encountered an oddity with firefox: after installing around 100 system fonts with bitstream font navigator and rebooting, I now find that firefox is displaying its menus in times new roman (the default proportional font I have set for pages). I'm used to firefox using the same sans serif font for its menus and toolbars as windows. No other programs seem affected. I can change the font in firefox by changing the default proportional font, but that's not what I want to do because that also changes the default font for all browser content itself and I want the default web page font to remain times roman. Any ideas on how I get firefox's menus back to the windows sans serif font default?

[Randall]

There doesn't seem to be anything in about:config that controls the GUI font, so you may have to dig into the css files to override whatever is doing that.

There's a userChrome-examples.css file in your profile's chrome directory. You might find what you're looking for in there, or if not go trawling through mozilla.org or Mozillazine for clues.

Maybe this is a weird Vista thing?

Randall

[Jeff]

The only thing I can think of is that maybe I did something bad to the default firefox menu font... or I'm going mad (or both)

I've finally settled to just set fonts -> advanced to:
Proportional: Sans Serif
Serif: Times New Roman
Sans-Serif: Arial
Monospace: Courier New

Which at least puts my menus to Arial, but it also means that any text in a web page that doesn't have a font tag / style gets rendered in Arial.

Before I could have sworn that menus were in an Arial-like font and Web Content defaulted to Times New Roman, but I see no option now to separate the two...

Anyone know what the default font used in firefox menus, toolbars, and sidebars is? (I don't think it's Arial, but it's some similar sans serif, right?)

(also thanks for the mozillazine tip... hopefully that huge community will have seen this oddity before.)

[Randall]

Anyone know what the default font used in firefox menus, toolbars, and sidebars is? (I don't think it's Arial, but it's some similar sans serif, right?) It's supposed to be using the OS's UI font.

In XP that would normally be Tahoma (I've changed mine to Verdana), but Vista has a new UI font. If you can still access the old-style Win2K UI settings -- in XP, it was Display Properties > Appearance > Advanced -- try changing the Menu font and see if it affects Firefox.

If not, this <profile>\chrome\userChrome.css file should override the so-called default: /*
* Edit this file and copy it as userChrome.css into your
* profile-directory/chrome/
*/

/*
* Do not remove the @namespace line -- it's required for correct functioning
*/
@namespace url("http://www.mozilla.org/keymaster/gatekeeper/there.is.only.xul"); /* set default namespace to XUL */


menupopup > * {
font-family: Tahoma !important
} I'm not sure what the CSS property for the menu headings is, but menupopup controls the text inside the menus. To set the font globally you would use something like * {
font-family: Calibri !important;
font-size: 13px; !important;
} Calibri is one of the new "C" Vista/Office 2007 fonts. Think I'll give it a try with Firefox, now that I'm playing with the CSS.

Speaking of Times New Roman, take a look at Cambria, which is the new default serif font in Office 2007.

Randall

[Jeff]

Thanks Randall! I tried changing
c:\program files\Mozilla Firefox\defaults\profile\chrome\userChrome-example.css to userChrome.css and making the above change, then changing the default content font from sans serif (arial) to serif (times) but the c:\program files\Mozilla Firefox\defaults\profile\chrome\userChrome.css did not override times in the menus when firefox was restarted...

(feel like one of the windows users who sends file.jpg.jpg.jpg because it hides the file extensions for you to be helpful by default...)

[Randall]

Thanks Randall! I tried changing
c:\program files\Mozilla Firefox\defaults\profile\chrome\userChrome-example.css to userChrome.css and making the above change, then changing the default content font from sans serif (arial) to serif (times) but the c:\program files\Mozilla Firefox\defaults\profile\chrome\userChrome.css did not override times in the menus when firefox was restarted... That is so bizarre. :ytthink:

Have you tried reinstalling Firefox? Or maybe starting over with a clean user profile? Sorta sounds like something in Firefox got corrupted.

Randall

[Jeff]

Figured it out.

I was missing Segoe UI (I had "Segoe" (including Segoe, Segoe Black, Black Italic, Bold, Bold Italic, Condensed, Condensed Bold, etc. etc.) but not "Segoe UI" installed on my system.

Without Segoe UI installed firefox defaulted to the default content font and the menus were displayed in this.

However, if I went to the desktop, clicked personalize -> window color and appearance -> open classic appearance for more options > windows aero and then changed the font for the message box or menus, this overrides firefox's toolbar and menu font.

[Randall]

Without Segoe UI installed firefox defaulted to the default content font and the menus were displayed in this. That makes some kind of sense, I suppose. Segoe UI is the Vista UI font (and the one font that you don't get with the Office 2007 file compatibility pack), and maybe Firefox assumes it'll be there based on the OS.

Supposedly Segoe UI is included with Windows Live Mail (http://get.live.com/wlmail/overview). Am I the only one who had no idea that Microsoft has a replacement for Outlook Express, aside from whatever it is they ship with Vista? (About @#$% time.)

Randall

[Jeff]

It makes some sense. One thing that made it difficult to track down was that when I looked under vista's appearance dialogue box, if you don't have the currently selected font on your system the font dropdown just shows nothing (so I thought it just meant it was using a default or hadn't been customized... if the font is missing, it doesn't show so you don't know what's missing.)

Another oddity was that even with Segoe UI missing Internet Explorer and my other apps still appeared visually identical to with it. I'm not sure if they somehow substituted another very very very similar font (maybe Segoe) for Segoe UI when Segoe UI was missing, or something else. The only places I noticed the absense were in Firefox (throughout the menus, toolbars, etc.) and in Vista Mail's mail check window and options menus which defaulted to a blocky font.

Haven't checked out Windows Live Mail, but have been giving Vista Windows Mail a spin and I have to say despite the lack of any buzz about it, it's pretty darn good. It's faster than thunderbird and doesn't give any errors searching as Outlook Express started to after I hit 150,000 emails archived.

[Randall]

Haven't checked out Windows Live Mail, but have been giving Vista Windows Mail a spin and I have to say despite the lack of any buzz about it, it's pretty darn good. It's faster than thunderbird and doesn't give any errors searching as Outlook Express started to after I hit 150,000 emails archived. I may try WLM on Boss #1. She had continuous problems with Mozilla and Thunderbird, so I moved her to OE with more than a little reluctance (she liked Thunderbird better herself).

Maybe we can hope that MS has learned a few things over the years. OE feels like an anachronism sometimes.

Randall

[Jeff]

Maybe that's what I like about it -- it's very simple and what you see is what you get in terms of what there is to the program. Sometimes I feel like current programs are so layered and polished that they become a distraction in themselves.

In fairness, I really need to give thunderbird another try now that I have much faster hardware -- it was too slow on my 533 FSB xeon but I think this new machine would run it nice and fast even with my huge message archive.

At first sight one thing I didn't like with thunderbird was the simple complexity of the folder tree.

In OE I simply created folders and a moving message rule for each account so I have:
inbox
outbox
sent
deleted items
drafts
junk mail
account 1
account 2
account 3
account 4
account 5
account 6

In thunderbird that becomes

account 1
inbox
trash
account 2
inbox
trash
account 3
inbox
trash
account 4
inbox
trash
account 5
inbox
trash
account 6
inbox
trash
Local Folders
inbox
unsent
drafts
sent
junk
trash

with all the separate trash folders and the inbox under each account with the longer folder tree makes me feel like a split personality...

I'd probably get used to it though.

Another thing is that it seemed easy to import from OE to thunderbird, but not necessarily back so I hesitated to take the one-way trip until I was sure.

[Randall]

with all the separate trash folders and the inbox under each account with the longer folder tree makes me feel like a split personality... It sounds like you haven't used Thunderbird in a while -- several versions back they made it possible to route incoming POP mail to a specific inbox on an account-by-account basis. It defaults to the "Global Inbox" (Local Folders > Inbox) when you create an account, but you have as many or as few full-blown inboxes as you like.

Once you set up the appropriate filter on each account to shunt the messages to folder accountX, it should replicate your OE setup pretty closely.

I think it's interesting that you used filters in OE to work around the single-mailbox limitation, and that you can make Thunderbird (which never had that problem to begin with) act like your OE hack. :wink:

Thunderbird 2.0 gives you an additional option: You can mark certain folders as "favorites," then switch the tree view to Favorite Folders so you only see the folders you really want. You could use that as an adjunct to the above or as a simpler alternative.

(The other view options are Recent Folders, Unread Folders and All Folders.)

Randall

[Jeff]

act like your OE hack.Once a hack has been in place for over 8 years it becomes not a hack but a way of life ;)

Will have to give thunderbird another try soon...

[Randall]

Once a hack has been in place for over 8 years it becomes not a hack but a way of life ;) Eh. If you've been doing it for that long, you might as well call it a hidden feature. :winky:

Randall