Do you write Gecko/Firefox patches or testcases, or monitor the Mozilla trees?

If so, you may run into new intermittent test failures due to a recent (intentional) behavior change.

On 2020-12-31, a patch landed in https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1676966 that changed how font fallback is handled. Previously, if the fonts specified in a page's CSS or through the browser prefs did not support a character present in the text, Gecko would potentially search all installed fonts to try and find one that could render the character. The first time this happens, it can be quite expensive, as it involves loading data from every installed font file, of which there may be thousands. Result: unpleasant jank.

To avoid this performance issue, we no longer block layout on the exhaustive search of all the fonts; instead, we start a background task to load the required character mappings from all the fonts, but proceed with layout using whatever fallbacks we may find, or just missing-glyph boxes. Once the font data is all loaded, we trigger a reflow everywhere so that content will be refreshed using the proper fonts.

Why does this matter for tests? It may result in two main types of failure in tests that are otherwise fine:

(1) If the test includes content -- such as text in a lesser-used Unicode script or unusual symbols -- that depends on font fallback, it may render with a different fallback font or not render at all during the initial pageload/reflow, if all the necessary font data has not yet been loaded. The rendering will be automatically corrected once the async font loading completes, but if the reftest harness has already taken a snapshot by that time, it may be too late, and the test fails.

(2) If async font data loading was triggered by the testcase, or by one shortly preceding it, an "unexpected" extra reflow event will happen when the loading completes. This can interfere with tests that are specifically concerned with event handling and expect a precisely-defined pattern of behavior, or are watching things like frame dimensions for changes.

Because the font fallback behavior is asynchronous (and the actual work happens in the parent process, while your testcase is usually running independently in a content process), the timing of all this cannot be accurately predicted, and failures may be intermittent.

(Note also that this async behavior only happens once per browser session, the first time content triggers a global font search. This means that which testcases are affected may depend on the chunking of test suites, and could change over time.)

If you have tests that are impacted by this, you can disable the async behavior -- reverting to the previous behavior where global font fallback, if needed, will block layout -- for them by setting the pref 'gfx.font_rendering.fallback.async' to false via a test manifest annotation or similar metadata.

We could simply run all tests with the pref set to false, to avoid these issues, but I'd prefer not to do that as we then wouldn't be testing the configuration we ship to users. So let's try to handle this by selectively disabling the new behavior only in cases where we see it causing actual problems. Thanks!

JK

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