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Font Settings

Font Settings API is now stable! See the chrome.fontSettings documentation.

Proposal Date Jan 17, 2012

Who is the primary contact for this API? *@)*Matt Falkenhagen (falken Who will be responsible for this API? (Team please, not an individual)

Chrome Tokyo team / Chrome i18n team

Overview Expose Chrome/WebKit font preferences to extensions, much like the Proxy Settings API. Use cases We want to add a more advanced font settings UI than is currently available, and it might be decided that it should be an extension in interest of keeping the Chrome UI simple.

Specifically, Chrome/WebKit recently added per-script font settings, so e.g., the "sans-serif" font setting for Simplified Chinese script can be different than the one for Traditional Chinese, or Japanese, etc. We want users to have access to these preferences. This is crbug.com/2685.

Furthermore, there are other font settings not currently exposed in the UI, such as for fantasy and cursive fonts. This API would allow extensions for those settings.

Do you know anyone else, internal or external, that is also interested in this API? No. Could this API be part of the web platform? No, this is simply client-side Chrome/WebKit settings. I don't see how it could be part of the web platform. Do you expect this API to be fairly stable? How might it be extended or changed in the future? Yes, it will be fairly stable, only changing when the underlying Chrome/WebKit settings change. Some reasons it may change are:

It could be extended if support for additional scripts or CSS font families is needed.
The per-script settings may be extended to be per-script+language. For example, Farsi/Persian may need to use a different font than the one for Arabic language although both are written in Arabic script.
Some settings like default font size, default fixed font size, minimum font size that are currently global settings may become per-script settings in the future.
We could also add more parameters like font settings for certain URL patterns.

List every UI surface belonging to or potentially affected by your API: Since it's exposing Chrome/WebKit font settings, it should affect only the web content renderer. These settings are not used in native UI surfaces to my knowledge.

How could this API be abused? Describe any concerns you have with exposing this API. Particular attention should be given to issues of security, privacy and performance.

Since Chrome observes font settings changes and propagates them to WebKit, which redraws as necessary, maybe an extension can cause performance disruptions.

Imagine you’re Dr. Evil Extension Writer, list the three worst evil deeds you could commit with your API (if you’ve got good ones, feel free to add more):

An extension that trashes the font settings. Uninstalling the extension would undo the damage.
An extension that rapidly keeps changing the fonts. It could conceivably be a DOS attack as WebKit tries to keep up. 3) An extension that reads font settings and uploads to a server to try to build a database fingerprinting users by the font settings. Also, if the API exposes a list of fonts installed on the system, it can also be a source of information for fingerprinting. See: http://trac.webkit.org/wiki/Fingerprinting

Alright Doctor, one last challenge: Could a consumer of your API cause any permanent change to the user’s system using your API that would not be reversed when that consumer is removed from the system?

No. It just uses the standard extension-controlled preferences feature which handles cleanup when the extension is uninstalled.

How would you implement your desired features if this API didn't exist? It could be part of the built-in Settings UI instead of relying on extensions. Draft API spec For the appropriate style, please refer to existing APIs as well as the other API proposals. For example, note that API calls that affect the browser process must be asynchronous, to prevent extension JavaScript from blocking on the browser UI. See the current API spec on trunk documentation.

Originally I planned to use ChromeSetting to expose all preferences, but there would be too many of them (about 30 scripts with 6 font families each...).

Open questions Note any unanswered questions that require further discussion.

There was a possibility of putting per-script and other advanced font settings in the built-in UI, but to keep Chrome UI simple this is unlikely to happen.