Let me start with a rant.
I have never especially liked the new Roboto 2014 font, and I vastly prefer the original Roboto 2011, which places me in a minority, since almost everyone prefers the new Roboto to the old. I hate many things about the new Roboto, such as the numbers 6 and 9 and the strange fi-ligature with the f and i unconnected, not least the straightening of the R-tail, something I have never forgiven Google for. I haven’t bought their legibility and clarity talk for six years, and I never will. I loved the curved R-tail of the old Roboto, and still do. (I think it works even better for Roboto than for Helvetica, the most famous example of a curved R-tail.)
Rant over.
This said, I have installed Roboto 2011 (not 2014) on my Windows laptop, and all has worked well so far, as I have never had to see the new Roboto. Until today.
Chrome auto-updated to 86.0.4240.198 today, and this seemingly innocuous update brought with it a catastrophic change (to me). Everything that used to have the old Roboto, from Drive to YouTube to the Chrome settings page, now shows up only in the new Roboto. I am now tired of creating custom CSS stylesheets (with the Stylus extension for Chrome) replacing Roboto with some other font I have installed, as every little CSS item needs to have its own rule, and there are far too many such objects across thousands of Google and non-Google websites.
I have reinstalled Roboto 2011, restarted Chrome, restarted my computer, all several times, to no avail. Everything in Chrome continues to show the new Roboto, and while the font-changing extensions in Chrome (aside from Stylus) do show the old Roboto in their selection menu (because I had asked them to accept Roboto 2011 TTF files on my system), the websites are nevertheless in the new Roboto. Nothing has worked.
The one thing I have not tried is uninstalling Chrome, as I have too much data across a number of extensions. Unfortunately, it seems I cannot simply downgrade Chrome without uninstalling it first.
I am now at the end of my tether, and all available options (other than manually writing CSS stylesheets for every little element on a page) have been exhausted. Extensions will not work on the Chrome settings and extensions pages anyway. (In non-Chrome apps, like Word, I do see the old Roboto as that’s the one that is installed on my system, but never in Chrome since the update. The new Roboto is no longer replaced by the old one.)
What can I do now to fight Google’s Robotisation drive on my computer?
<head>tag. For examples see this link.@font-face{font-style:normal;font-family:"Arial";src:local("Roboto")}@font-face{font-style:bolder;font-family:"Arial";src:local("Roboto")}in the <head> tag, and it has not worked. Either way, it is not going to solve the problem of the new Roboto loading in the Chrome settings page, or the header of a PDF, or a number of other places, with no way to change to the old Roboto.