A brief overview
I'm running Google Chrome stable, Google Chrome beta, and Chromium on Ubuntu 20.04. A couple of months ago, these Chromium-based applications started showing a weird behavior where some or all Website elements and parts of the Chromium UI are suddenly displayed using the font "Hell Finland".
Here's a picture of what's happening:
Symptoms
The problem occurs seemingly independent of anything else that is going on on the machine.
Sometimes this happens right after the system booted and sometimes it's been running for multiple days before I encounter this problem. While it sometimes happens that multiple of these Chromium-based applications show this behavior at the same time, it mostly happens to only of the applications at a time.
It's also worth noting that this problem doesn't suddenly change the font of the entire application. It rather only happens to newly opened tabs and DevTool panes. While all newly opened tabs and DevTools show this behavior as described, Chromium internal pages (like settings and flags) never seem to be affected by it.
I tried associating occurrences of this problem with the following characteristics:
- time
- day of the week
- newly installed packages
- active extensions
- visited websites Unfortunately, there were no common events that make it possible to associate the occurrences of this behavior.
Environment
I'm running Ubuntu 20.04 on three different systems and all of them have this problem at least once a week. I've also had installations of Fedora and Arch running on some systems and VM's, but none of these showed any of the symptoms, which is the reason I decided to post this issue in the Ask Ubuntu Forum.
The problem also occurred multiple times on VM's that have been set up with the Ubuntu 20.04 minimal installation. All of them have been fully updated. The only piece of software on them was a fresh installation of the Chromium snap. These Chromium installations didn't have any Extensions, Addons or Themes installed when the problem occurred.
All that makes me fairly confident, that this problem has something to do with Ubuntu and Chromium in general.
Package sources
Since I didn't really keep track of this problem during the first couple of weeks I encountered it, I'm unable to state the exact version that introduced this problem for me. But since I'm updating fairly regularly, the time period during which I started having this issue suggests that any version starting with 84.* has this issue.
- Chromium -> Snapstore
- Google Chrome (stable, beta, dev) -> Google's official apt repository (http://dl.google.com/linux/chrome/deb/)
Steps to reproduce
- Install Ubuntu 20.04 (or newer)
- Install Chromium and/or Google Chrome
- Use the installed software until you encounter the problem
Temporary fixes
Most of the time this problem goes away after restarting the application. If that doesn't help restart the system.
Hopes and dreams
My goal is to find others who have the same problem. Any suggestions on how to go about debugging this problem or finding reliable steps to reproduce this problem are always welcome!
