Chrome vs. BlinkMacSystemFont: A Workaround

The problem

As detailed before there’s this bug that shipped with Chromium 81 which somehow prevents the font-weight CSS property from being applied on the BlinkMacSystemFont font. Quite annoying, as that font is part of the widespread system font stack and affects all modern versions of macOS.

The Chromium bug itself is marked as a blocker for Chromium M83 – the next Chromium version – but as far as I can tell there’s no real progress being made on it. Above that the M83-based build of Google Chrome won’t start shipping until May 19, so we’re stuck for at least another month with this issue. Other browsers (such as Edge, Brave, etc.) might ship their M83-based build even later.

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The Fix

As a workaround, some users have suggested to simply not use SF Pro (which is the outcome of using BlinkMacSystemFont) but that’s quite a hard measure I must say. Thankfully there’s a better solution. Thanks to Twitter I’ve come to known that the Inter font family is practically a drop-in replacement for SF Pro.

Here on bram.us I’ve adjusted my font stack to no longer use BlinkMacSystemFont and load Inter – served by Google Fonts – instead. To preserve other platforms to load their own system font, I’ve added Inter somewhere at the back of the line.

Here’s a diff of my CSS:

+ @import url('https://fonts.googleapis.com/css2?family=Inter&display=swap');

…

- font-family: -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, "Segoe UI", "Roboto", "Oxygen", "Ubuntu", "Cantarell", "Fira Sans", "Droid Sans", 'Inter', "Helvetica Neue", sans-serif;
+ font-family: -apple-system, "Segoe UI", "Roboto", "Oxygen", "Ubuntu", "Cantarell", "Fira Sans", "Droid Sans", 'Inter', "Helvetica Neue", sans-serif;

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With this adjustment in place my website looks quite decent again. Let’s hope the Chromium team can fix this issue soon. In the mean time we can use Inter as workaround.