Font management in Firefox is a mess

If you’re Firefox, you can go to “Tools” → “Options…” → “Content” to see what I mean, or refer to the screenshots that follow. I’ve clicked the “Help” button, but nothing helpful was found there, so here goes my rant.

There’s a setting for a “Default Font” and “Size” there. Let’s hold that aside for a second.

Now, we click the “Advanced…” button and a new window comes up.

Three questions:

1. On the top, there’s “Fonts for:” dropdown menu listing various languages. So, if I choose “Greek”, the changes I’ll make will be applied to all the Greek encodings (iso-8859-7, win-1253)? And If that’s the case, how do I change the fonts for the Unicode (UTF-8) encoding?
2. What exactly does the “Proportional” font (style) mean?
3. Back to the “Default Font” and “Size” settings. Where exactly do they map to a propos to the “Advanced…” window? That is to say, when I’m setting the “Default Font” and “Size” to “Trebuchet MS” and “14” respectively, this changes the settings in which “Fonts for:” menu option? Some quick tests didn’t help me pull any clear conclusions.

I consider myself an experienced tweaker/hacker but as you can tell, tweaking the fonts in Firefox proved to be a bit problematic for me — this wasn’t the case with Opera’s browser where font controls may be a bit too detailed, but they’re easy to grasp.

If you know the answer to one or maybe all of the questions I’ve posted, I’d appreciate it if you could help me. (Oh, and if you could also help me get rid of Arial font in Gmail’s form fields and buttons, let me know.) √ Jun 5th, 2006