Snow Leopard/Firefox Font Fix
Hello to everyone having the weird issue with Firefox 3.52 displaying the font in the bookmark bar and various other areas as bold. Perhaps you see it as looking something like this…
Not exactly what you want to be looking at after a new OS upgrade touting some new font smoothing properties! We’ll, I have a fix that worked for me. Hopefully it helps.
The Fix
Well, if you’re like me you probably have some form of font management going on. I’m using Suitcase Fusion 2. In order to fix the issue, just go ahead and enable/activate all your Lucida font families. I’m not sure which exact family fixed it, but I’m okay with enabling the few that I have. Close out Firefox and then fire it back and you should be good.
Enjoy Snow Leopard. It’s feeling pretty peppy to me.


Nope. That didn’t work for me. Also using SFusion2… Everything still bold.
Bummer. Hope you find luck for your system. It’s definitely not an isolated issue that’s for sure.
Cool, thanks! I didn’t activate them, I just added FF to the auto-activate list and it also worked.
Wanted to say thanks for the tip! I spent a while thinking it was Firefox that was to blame, but it was really a Font management problem.
I use FontExplorer and I disabled/re-enabled the Lucida families, then cleared application and system font caches, and finally restarted my system. The combination of all the changes seems to have fixed it.
Thanks for the tip, I’m using FontExplorer and used it todo “Clean System font folders” and that did the trick
Thx for your tip!
I searched about one hour for a solution to fix this problem and in my case it was also the option “Clean System font folder” of FontExplorer. Great ;)
“Clean system font caches” worked for me as well. I am running Snow Leopard with FontExplorer.
Thanks! Clearing the font cache solved the problem for me, too. Quick note for anyone reading this after me that a reboot is necessary after clearing the cache.
When Firefox looks like this for me, I quit Firefox, deactivate and reactivate the postscript version of Helvetica in Suitcase Fusion 2, then open Firefox again and it looks fine. I don’t understand why, but it works…
I use Linotype’s Font Explorer X (free version) to manage my fonts and saw the same problem described here after — not after I upgraded to 10.6 (I actually just bought a new (well, refurbished) machine with 10.6), but after getting Firefox 3.6. Also, the Times font I use for serif display of web pages would be shown in bold or italic instead of roman.
I did not activate Lucida fonts other than the basic Lucida Grande system font. And clearing the cache via Font Explorer did not help. Instead, a “safe” boot (holding down cmd-s) appears to have fixed things.