Compatibility issue with the Foundation template (v2026.6)

[FabienL]

Hello everyone,

Following our recent upgrade to v2026.6 of Discourse, we are experiencing an unexpected issue with the Foundation template we are using.

We have performed several checks on our end (basic tests, log inspection, disabling other components, checking color palettes), but at this stage, we have not been able to identify the exact cause of the problem or find a solution to fix it.

Has anyone else encountered similar issues with this template since the update? Do you have any leads for investigation, specific changes in the core of v2026.6 to point out, or suggestions to offer?

Any help or ideas would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance for your feedback!

Before the update:

After:

[Moin]

There is an upcoming change Modernizing the Foundation theme which is probably enabled by default now.
I think right now you can still revert the changes by navigating to /admin/config/upcoming-changes and selecting “no one” for this change.

But once the change becomes permanent that won’t work anymore. Then you would need a custom theme component that overrides the new default.

[NateDhaliwal]

What are some problems or differences that you are having trouble with?

[FabienL]

Hello both,

Thank you for this initial feedback.

@NateDhaliwal

1 - Some space has been added above and below the search bar

2 - The bold font has been changed to semi-bold

3 - The text has less contrast, with a slight blur that has appeared.

[awesomerobot (Kris)]

@FabienL

3 - The text has less contrast, with a slight blur that has appeared.

This can be changed by adding this to your theme’s CSS:

body {
    --webkit-font-smoothing: auto;
}

There’s some detail about what this does here: A Modern CSS Reset • Josh W. Comeau…

In macOS Mojave, released in 2018, Apple disabled subpixel antialiasing across the operating system. I’m guessing they realized that it was doing more harm than good on modern hardware.

Confusingly, macOS browsers like Chrome and Safari still use subpixel antialiasing by default. We need to explicitly turn it off, by setting -webkit-font-smoothing to antialiased.

To demonstrate the difference… --webkit-font-smoothing: auto; on the left, and --webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; on the right

macOS renders text heavier by default, but only in browsers and not the rest of the OS… antialiased gets it closer in appearance to how text is rendered in other operating systems… in Chrome on Windows the CSS doesn’t apply and the text looks like this by default:

It’s debatable whether or not it’s worth adding as a reset like we are with this change… it technically makes fonts lighter on macOS which looks closer to other operating systems, but the mechanism is different because they’re different text rendering engines.

Windows, while similarly light after applying this change for macOS, will still render fonts slightly sharper because of the engine differences (Windows does subpixel antialiasing, which is what gets turned off by this CSS on macOS).