I’m running Figma on linux in the browser with figma-linux-font-helper to enable usage of local fonts — this helper is basically a drop-in replacement for the official Figma font helper with the difference that it also works on linux.

Well, it did until today, when I noticed that my local fonts are not available anymore. When Investigating the issue I found that requests to localhost or 127.0.0.1 (with the purpose of communicating with the font helper) were no longer showing up in the network panel of the browser dev tools. Two days ago, everything was working fine and I didn’t change anything on my system since then. I asked around and for other people it’s basically the same story.

After further experiments I discovered that Figma still send the requests, when I overwrite my User agent to:

Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_14_6) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/120.0.0.0 Safari/537.36

My suspicion now is that the app is sniffing the user agent and is not sending the requests to localhost, when it detects that it’s running on linux.

I can’t think of a good explaination how this could be a bug and I’m afraid this is intentional. If that’s the case: WTF?