Tor as a Tool for Testing Fonts
A concern that may occur to you when you are designing a website is whether or not the font that you are using is “web-safe”, meaning that the user will be able to render it on their end when they load your webpage because they already have that font on their device. Web-safe fonts include the typical well-known fonts, like Times New Roman, Arial, etc. If you are using non-web-safe fonts on your website, typically you will either define a fallback font in the CSS that is used if the user does not have the font in question and/or supply the user with the font using some kind of web font delivery service like Google Fonts or Font Squirrel or by packaging the font directly with the website.
I am, at present, using two different non-web-safe fonts for this website that I must supply the user with:
- EB Garamond, which I supply using a font delivery service;
- Gadelica, which I supply the font files for directly bundled with the website.
Testing whether or not these fonts are being distributed correctly can be difficult, as I already have these fonts installed on my system, so they will render correctly even if the website is not distributing them correctly to the user. There are a couple different ways to test this, such as using a different device, but one way that I’ve found to be particularly convenient is to use the Tor Browser.
The Tor Browser is a browser that intends to offer a level of anonymity and security when browsing the Internet. The main way in which it provides this is by routing the user’s traffic through a number of different nodes to obfuscate where the user’s traffic is coming from, but it also employs a number of anti-browser-fingerprinting techniques to prevent the user’s computer from being recognised, including managing the window dimensions and sandboxing the user’s fonts; because a computer could be potentially identified by the unique combination of fonts installed on the machine, a malicious website could fingerprint or identify a user based on the fonts available to them. Therefore, the Tor Browser comes with a number of generic pre-bundled fonts and does not have access to any of your system fonts, making it harder to fingerprint you and, incidentally, working as a handy tool for checking how web-safe a font is.
If you open your website in the Tor Browser, and the fonts render as expected, you know the fonts are being supplied correctly; if the fonts do not render correctly, you not that they are not being supplied correctly. I personally use this test all the time when setting up a website, as it’s one of the handiest and simplest ways I know to test such a thing.