The Google Chrome web browser is moving away from the FreeType font rendering library and instead pursuing their Skrifa project that is written in Rust for better memory safety around handling fonts on the web.
Skrifa is written by Google engineers in the Rust programming language and aiming for better security than FreeType for font handling within web browsers. Due to FreeType being the primary font processing library across Android, ChromeOS, and Linux, any vulnerabilities affecting it are potentially catastrophic for a web browser when loading remote/unsafe web fonts and more.
Skrifa is written in Rust and aims to tackle the subset of FreeType functionality used by Google’s Skia graphics library. Since Chrome 133 last month Skrifa as part of the Fontations libraries is being used on Linux, Android, and Chrome OS as well as a fallback on Windows and macOS.
Google noted in a blog post this week:
“We are very pleased with the results of our efforts to use Rust for text. Delivering safer code to users and gaining developer productivity is a huge win for us. We plan to continue to seek opportunities to use Rust in our text stacks. If you’d like to know more, Oxidize outlines some of Google Fonts future plans.”
More details on this Skrifa replacement to FreeType via the Google Chrome Developer Blog.
