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Comment by thristian | Hacker News Reader

Preferences → Content → Fonts & Colors → Advanced → Allow pages to choose their own fonts, instead of my selections above

Untick that box, set the Firefox defaults to something attractive like Droid Sans, and rejoice at how readable the Web becomes.

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I do this, but warn that it sometimes leads to sites breaking: text spilling out of boxes or getting obscured by running under other elements.

Web-designers: please make your sites robust to people picking their own fonts, and also robust to users enforcing a minimum font size!

This is exactly why anyone that says they are a web designer - yet does all their work in some 'pixel perfect' tool like Macromedia (or whatever the 'cool kids' use these days) is just deluding themselves.

Turn off the stylesheet and it's readable again, and you don't have to change any persistent settings.

View → Page Style → No Style

Turning off the stylesheet on every page as I browse the web would be a hassle; much better to change a setting once and never have to worry about it again. About the only pages I've found that aren't improved by enforcing a sensible font-choice are pages designed to showcase CSS3 font embedding - and those are pretty rare.

I do wish browsers would have a per-host "allow custom fonts" setting, alongside the tradition per-host "allow images" and "allow cookies" settings. With the potential security implications of downloadable fonts, it seems only sensible - but nobody seems interested in implementing such a thing. :(

Turning off the settings persistently, and you don't have to turn off stylesheets ever again. And pages suddenly start respecting your preferences!

Third thing I do after a fresh FF install! While you're at it play with "Minimum font size" as well if small fonts have ever bothered you.

I regret that I have but one upvote to give - thank you for saving my Internet.

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