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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?

What are you guys doing now for getting local fonts in web app?

I have no fonts at all. Linux app “Text” functionality doesnt work.😑

Thanks for sharing your findings! It’s frustrating when things break unexpectedly like this. The user agent workaround is clever, but I hope Figma reconsiders if this is intentional—Linux users deserve better support!

Sharing what worked for me. There are a few of different linux agents and here is the only one setup that works for me:

  1. Download chrome
  2. Install GitHub - neetly/figma-agent-linux: Figma Agent for Linux (a.k.a. Font Helper)
  3. Reboot
  4. Open the terminal and paste:
USER_AGENT="Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/120.0.0.0 Safari/537.3"
google-chrome-stable --user-agent="${USER_AGENT}" https://www.figma.com/files/recent

 

I can confirm that these steps work well on Ubuntu 24.04.

Brave or Firefox won’t load fonts.

I can say that both Brave & Firefox work. Use the custom-useragent-string to set the user agent only for https://www.figma.com/.

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