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A brief overview

I'm running Google Chrome stable, Google Chrome beta, and Chromium on Ubuntu 20.04. A couple of months ago, these Chromium-based applications started showing a weird behavior where some or all Website elements and parts of the Chromium UI are suddenly displayed using the font "Hell Finland".

Here's a picture of what's happening: Chromium on Ubuntu 20.04 using Hell Finland as the Webfont

Symptoms

The problem occurs seemingly independent of anything else that is going on on the machine.

Sometimes this happens right after the system booted and sometimes it's been running for multiple days before I encounter this problem. While it sometimes happens that multiple of these Chromium-based applications show this behavior at the same time, it mostly happens to only of the applications at a time.

It's also worth noting that this problem doesn't suddenly change the font of the entire application. It rather only happens to newly opened tabs and DevTool panes. While all newly opened tabs and DevTools show this behavior as described, Chromium internal pages (like settings and flags) never seem to be affected by it.

I tried associating occurrences of this problem with the following characteristics:

  • time
  • day of the week
  • newly installed packages
  • active extensions
  • visited websites Unfortunately, there were no common events that make it possible to associate the occurrences of this behavior.

Environment

I'm running Ubuntu 20.04 on three different systems and all of them have this problem at least once a week. I've also had installations of Fedora and Arch running on some systems and VM's, but none of these showed any of the symptoms, which is the reason I decided to post this issue in the Ask Ubuntu Forum.

The problem also occurred multiple times on VM's that have been set up with the Ubuntu 20.04 minimal installation. All of them have been fully updated. The only piece of software on them was a fresh installation of the Chromium snap. These Chromium installations didn't have any Extensions, Addons or Themes installed when the problem occurred.

All that makes me fairly confident, that this problem has something to do with Ubuntu and Chromium in general.

Package sources

Since I didn't really keep track of this problem during the first couple of weeks I encountered it, I'm unable to state the exact version that introduced this problem for me. But since I'm updating fairly regularly, the time period during which I started having this issue suggests that any version starting with 84.* has this issue.

Steps to reproduce

  • Install Ubuntu 20.04 (or newer)
  • Install Chromium and/or Google Chrome
  • Use the installed software until you encounter the problem

Temporary fixes

Most of the time this problem goes away after restarting the application. If that doesn't help restart the system.

Hopes and dreams

My goal is to find others who have the same problem. Any suggestions on how to go about debugging this problem or finding reliable steps to reproduce this problem are always welcome!

You'reAGitForNotUsingGit
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Leon Mydla
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  • Could you attach a screenshot to get a better idea what's wrong? You might try refreshing font cache, for Chromium: sudo snap run --shell chromium -c 'FONTCONFIG_FILE="${SNAP_COMMON}/fontconfig/fonts.conf" "${SNAP_DESKTOP_RUNTIME}/usr/bin/fc-cache" --force --system-only --verbose'. Chrome should be using system cache, refreshing: sudo fc-cache --force --system-only --verbose. And restart browser. – Tombart Mar 04 '21 at 12:51
  • As I, unfortunately, don't have a reliable way of reproducing this issue, I will have to wait until this happens again to take a screenshot. – Leon Mydla Mar 04 '21 at 20:24
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    @Tombart I've just added an Image of Chromium having this problem. – Leon Mydla Mar 16 '21 at 14:47
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    Different font, but same problem here. No idea what causes it. Restarting Chromium fixes it. – Robby Cornelissen Apr 06 '21 at 13:27
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    I'm having the same problem! except In my case it looks like the font is "Humor Sans", which is every bit as horrible as you might imagine. Would be cool to get this fixed, but not sure what's going on. Picture of Chrome with errant fonts – Nadim Apr 30 '21 at 15:33
  • This is how it looks on my machine. I experience exactly the same problem. Font problem on ubuntu 20.04 and chromium – Duckingham Apr 29 '21 at 11:28
  • Similar problem here on Ubuntu 20.04.03. This may be a stretch, but in my case I see some correlation with the use of the Zoom video conferencing desktop app. Does any of you happen to have that installed as well? Or notice the font change after any kind of video conferencing? – Timothy Feb 11 '22 at 10:05

1 Answers1

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I see the same from time to time. I've noticed clear correlation with snap package update.

Last changes:

$ snap changes
ID   Status  Spawn                   Ready                   Summary
180  Done    yesterday at 19:18 MSK  yesterday at 19:19 MSK  Auto-refresh snap "chromium"

Currently installed version:

$ snap info chromium
name:      chromium
summary:   Chromium web browser, open-source version of Chrome
publisher: Canonical✓
store-url: https://snapcraft.io/chromium
contact:   https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/chromium-browser/+bugs?field.tag=snap
license:   unset
description: |
  An open-source browser project that aims to build a safer, faster, and more
  stable way for all Internet users to experience the web.
commands:
  - chromium.chromedriver
  - chromium
snap-id:      XKEcBqPM06H1Z7zGOdG5fbICuf8NWK5R
tracking:     latest/stable
refresh-date: yesterday at 19:19 MSK
channels:
  latest/stable:    99.0.4844.51  2022-03-02 (1926) 141MB -
  latest/candidate: 99.0.4844.51  2022-03-02 (1926) 141MB -
  latest/beta:      99.0.4844.45  2022-02-24 (1921) 141MB -
  latest/edge:      100.0.4896.12 2022-02-25 (1922) 137MB -
installed:          99.0.4844.51             (1926) 141MB -

Finally, the chromium instance being run at the moment:

$ ps x | grep chromium | head -n 1
914290 ?        SLl  221:22 /snap/chromium/1912/usr/lib/chromium-browser/chrome --password-store --incognito

The possible solution is to disable automatic update of the package while it's running. (https://askubuntu.com/a/1263653)

$ snap set core experimental.refresh-app-awareness=true

Another way to address the problem is to install chromium manually (get binaries or build chromium from source on your own).

Ilya Butorov
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