For anyone using Safari on desktop to browse the site, would you please let me know if you’re seeing any funky issues with fonts not loading properly? I’m seeing some potential oddness on my local machine, but only on desktop, not on mobile. Looks like this:
Instead of the google-provided fonts loading, they’re all failing and the browser is substituting in the default system fonts in their places. When I peek at the safari console, it looks like the browser requests for the fonts are all failing with an HTTP error code 400 (“invalid request”).
I’m only seeing this on (desktop) Safari—not Chrome, Brave, Firefox, or Edge. I think the problem behavior is related to us enabling Cloudflare’s “Cloudflare Font” functionality (more technical details can be had in this blog post), but before I spend time digging in and troubleshooting, I’d like to know if anyone else is experiencing the issue. Probably the quick-n-dirty solution is to disable Cloudflare Fonts, but I’d prefer not to do that unless we have to.
Please do weigh in below if this is something you’ve noticed!
It is not, unfortunately — it’s an on/off feature. The idea behind the feature is to decrease page load times by serving Google Fonts directly off of Cloudflare’s CDN rather than forcing visitors’ browsers to make additional (often sloooooooooooooooooooow) requests to Google’s font CDN, and it does this with some magic URL funkiness. But for whatever reason, Safari isn’t playing nice.
The problem behavior persists with CF Fonts disabled; it appears that WP APO is doing something funky with desktop safari, as when I spoof safari’s useragent string to something else (like Chrome), the problem behavior instantly vanishes.
Went ahead and opened a trouble ticket with Cloudflare, so we’ll see if they can offer any assistance. It looks like about 6% of visitors are using desktop Safari, so it’s definitely a problem I want to get fixed ASAP. We’ll see what support says!
