New Day, a new reason to scratch my head. This time, User Agent Stylesheet on Safari. It overwrites my CSS and makes my title bold. (This is now fixed, thanks to Christopher Kirk-Nielsen! see below)

Here’s my website’s title on Firefox, Edge and Arc (Chromium-based):

An illustration of an owl holding a red book accompanies the title The Art Of Not Asking Why with the subtitle Don't ask me why, I'll tell you anyway, along with buttons labeled About, Archive and More, Photos, and Movies.

… And here’s my website’s title on Safari:

A cartoon owl holding a red book is featured alongside the title The Art Of Not Asking Why with a subtitle and navigation buttons for About, Archive and More, Photos, and Movies.

The issue seems to be rooted in something called “User Agent Stylesheet,” which, from my understanding, is a user-browser-made CSS stylesheet that comes on top of the website’s CSS and overwrites it. My website is not the only place, by the way. Certain websites I visit also seem to have too much of a font-weight, though most are fine.

It makes sense to adjust certain visual elements to the user’s liking, and I can stand behind that. Your browser, your rules.

However, I didn’t know this thing existed. I have no idea why Safari thinks I’d like all <H1> tags in bold and where to find this setting to get rid of it.


The fix: define the desired font-weight.

Why: I did not define my bold-weight for the site’s header because it looked fine as long as I used Arc and Firefox. Safari is a bit special, and it decided that since this looks like a header, it should probably be bold. With the font-weight defined, it uses what it’s told.