title: “Kernest and Namoroka” meta: “Tinkering with @font-face” byline: “User agents matter” layout: post … While trying out @font-face and Kernest, I ran into a rather weird issue. Viewing the site in my default browser, Firefox, would reveal a rather unappealing site with generic sans-serif fonts, and a header saying “your browser doesn’t support @font-face”. Wait, what? My browser? I’m pretty confident that Firefox 3.5+ does indeed supoort @font-face… Let’s try this on chrome…

Opening the same site in Chrome revealed a very different site with beautiful fonts all over the place. Huh. I had already included a nifty font for the header on this very site by this time, from Kernest, which would show in all it’s awesomeness in Chrome, but a generic default font in my trusty Firefox.

Next step, was having a look at what the browser was getting fed through the external stylesheet from Kernest. As I was in Chrome, I typed the URL out and voilà, a load of comments telling us where the CSS came from, and a single @font-face declaration. Doesn’t look wrong to me… Should work. So why…. wait! Let’s open the same thing in Firefox, just in case. In awe, I saw Firefox getting a blank document from the stylesheet URL. The light bulb lit up! User-agent sniffing.

Why does that matter? Well, I happen to use a development version of firefox, which isn’t actually branded as firefox, but uses the development codename: “Namoroka” (try to read it with a japanese accent, makes it sound much better). And obviously, my user-agent string was “Blah blah blah blah blah blah Namoroka/3.6.3”. I guess nobody at Kernest thought about that. But the fix on my side was simple enough. Browsing to about:config, and creating a new string of name general.useragent.override with the desired value was good enough. I used this handy site to find out my exact user agent, and simply replaced “Namoroka” with “Firefox”. Lo and behold, things worked from this point onwards. True haxxor magic!

On the other hand, I guess Namoroka could identify itself as Firefox rather safely, in my humble opinion. Also, 3.6.3 is not really a development version, it simply was never branded propperly in the Arch repos.