This is a Mac OS X issue. If the permissions on your font folder aren't set right and a website tries to use obscure (or "any" font), Mac OSX will ask you for your password to use fonts (perhaps for each font requested). There are a few websites out there that explain and help you fix it like that one:

http://homepage.mac.com/macdrben/blogwavestudio/LH20041002162312/LHA20050717180701/index.html

The proposed soltion involves permissions and blames the OS.

Before the latest Firefox (3.6.3) it didn't search external drives sweeping for any random font to load. Its trying to add in Hebrew, Cyrillic and tons of fonts from my internal and external folders.

The external system folders are bootable systems, I cannot just use batchmod and change all their permissions.

Safari and Chrome do not have this problem.

Sorry but the program you suggest using doesn't work to fix the problem and should not be necessary at all. Even if the program did work I shouldn't have to do this for every font to use a browser - you'd think that what this program does would happen when you check the box to always allow Firefox to use the font. I'm moving to Safari.

If Firefox finds them while that external drive is not connected then you must have an indexing service that responds to the query that Firefox makes while scanning for font files. So you may need to look at the settings in Finder and Spotlight and exclude external drives from getting indexed. See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spotlight_%28software%29

If you were to turn off Searchlight's indexing of fonts or external drives in general, wouldnt this make your system less efficient for everything else that might need to be able to access these? I wonder about this since you cant tell it to only exclude a drive. etc when Firefox makes a request...

Yeah the whole "blame the OS" thing is a red herring. What the hell is Firefox doing looking on my external drives in the first place? It asks permission to use a font on another drive, but what else is it looking at outside of the Applications folder where it should know enough to mind its own business?

webfonts. I think this is the actual issue here. I'm not an expert, but I am a web designer and developer. I think the sites you're going to are using @font-face. This allows a web site to host the font file that you probably don't have on your computer. What happens is that the font is downloaded form the server and then your browser uses the font. It seems that the computer thinks this might be a security threat. The odd thing is that it don't happen for every server hosted font using @font-face. You can go to http://www.google.com/webfonts to see a whole bunch of these fonts in action. I'm not sure whats going on with it. That's how I ended up here.

• /questions/770549 "Firefox wants to use the font ..."
• /questions/768100 Why does firefox want to use different fonts on mounted hard drives

Move all User fonts in Font Book to Computer fonts.

1. Launch Font Book (/Applications/Utilities/)
2. Open Font Book > Preferences
3. Deselect: "Automatic Font Activation"
4. Set the "Default Install Location" for fonts to "Computer"
5. Select all User fonts
6. Move the selected User fonts to Computer fonts
7. Remove all duplicate fonts in Computer fonts