How to disable the new bold font in Chrome 124

After updating Google Chrome to version 124, you could already noticed changes in font rendering. The font used in tab titles, menus, bookmarks, and some other interface elements has become bold and a bit blurry on some devices. While you can tolerate the bold font, you won't be happy to see the blurry captions. Thankfully, it is easy to fix this issue.

The new font change is part of the underlying graphical library update introduced in Chrome 124. We have mentioned it in our release overview.

When rendering text, the Skia library takes into account the contrast and color settings specified in Windows for ClearType text smoothing technology. It was supposed to significantly improve the quality of font display on LCD monitors. But since graphical and display settings may differ between users, the new font appears renders differently for different users.

Let's hope that Chrome dev will further improve the font appearance in future browser updates. But in the meantime, you can restore the font used in previous versions of Chrome.

Disable Bold Font in Chrome 124

1. Open the internal flag page by typing chrome://flags in the URL box.
2. Start typing font in the search box.
3. Look for the "Refresh 2023 Top Chrome Font Style" option.
4. To the right of the option name, select "Disabled" from the drop-down menu and click the "Relaunch" button.

That's it. The browser will restart and you will see that the previous font is back.

If you change your mind, then for restoring the new font, follow the instructions above but set the Refresh 2023 Top Chrome Font Style flag to the Default value.