Sudden default font change on Brave for Android

Browser Support Mobile Support
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1

Description of the issue:

Brave browser for Android changed the default font suddenly without any manual changes to the Browser or system settings. It’s been like this since last night(Oct 8, 2025). Unlike the default font, now it looks like a gothic font.

How can this issue be reproduced?

  1. Unfortunately, I don’t think the issue can be reproduced. The browser spontaneously changed the fonts.

  2. The issue persists.

Expected result:

Brave should use the default Android system’s font.

Brave Version( check About Brave):

1.83.109 Chromium: 141.0.7390.55

OS: Android 15 ; Build/AP3A.240905.015.A2; 35 ; REL

Mobile Device details

Galaxy S21 5G

Additional Information:

Trouble shooting measures I’ve tried but didn’t resolve the problem

  • Deleting and reinstalling the App.
  • Delete browser cache and restart my phone.
  • reset brave://flags

You can see the differences when googling the same keyword in Brave vs Chrome

brave
brave1080×2400 173 KB

chrome
chrome1080×2400 165 KB

2

@hwkim301 very strange – Brave on Android does not actually have anywhere in which you can directly/manually change fonts to begin with. Can you confirm whether or not you see this on all sites, or is it just in the Google search summaries?

3

I’m not 100% sure, but I think the font mostly changes when doing a Google search and not on other sites.

Do you think it might be a Chromium font rendering issue? or could it be something specific to the font handling in Samsung’s One UI?

4

Yeah I would check your Android device settings and see if something has changed there. So you’re only seeing this in Brave on the Google search results page?

5

Yup, I’m pretty positive that this appears only in Brave on the Google search results page.

It also behaved the same for the private mode in Brave.

Now I’m pretty convinced the problem isn’t directly connected to Brave.

I checked if any of my other Google accounts had the same font issues, but the other accounts didn’t have any problems.

I’m guessing that I’m one of the experimenters for Google’s Live Experiment, because the problem exists for only a specific account(my main account) or when I’m logged out.

Google says if I’m selected for Google’s Live Experiment it can show weird fonts as the default font, even when I don’t login.

I’ll write a post for the Google support community team to confirm if this is the cause of the problem.

Thanks for the replies. I think you can check this as completed or resolved for now since it doesn’t seem to be a Brave bug.

6

I think this problem occurs beacuse fingerprinting is blocked in braves’ shield and privacy settings. Websites use fingerprinting to indentify which fonts you have, how your browser renders graphics (canvas fingerprinting).

I also experienced this and sure enough in my case, turning fingerprinting on solved the issue.

Now that I know the cause I’m sticking to blocking fingerprinting cause why not :upside_down_face:

7

Thanks for the tip. I just turned on the blocking fingerprinting option. It was turned off for some reason. It hasn’t solved the problem yet, but I hope it fixes it.:saluting_face: