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A 1.2 MB blog post complaining about bloat.
edit: read the child comments, I was not entirely correct. To be fair, the vast majority of that bloat is due to ~~the picture of her face~~ hidden GIFs on the page. Some testing reveals that the page, minus ~~her~~ those pictures, is 159KB. If you were anything like me on my first data plan (a whopping 25MB/month) images are usually the first thing to go.
My feeling on web fonts is that that they can sometimes look nice but aren't worth the page weight. My approach is to pick two fonts I expect MacOS and Windows to have, then fall back to generic. Other times, I'm more lazy and just use the generic. To put it more bluntly: https://bestmotherfucking.website/#remote-fonts
But if you want to use them make them optional like this site explains :)
For anyone missing the WW reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wvr1T1sFvEg
After instinctively reading the headline in a Rob Ritchie voice I am realizing I may have watched the West Wing too many times.
It's the only show I can watch over-and-over again.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
edit: read the child comments, I was not entirely correct. To be fair, the vast majority of that bloat is due to ~~the picture of her face~~ hidden GIFs on the page. Some testing reveals that the page, minus ~~her~~ those pictures, is 159KB. If you were anything like me on my first data plan (a whopping 25MB/month) images are usually the first thing to go.
That image is only 17.6 kB.
For God's sake man, don't leave a huge, fast gif infinitely looping where I can see it while trying to read your blog post. Make it activate after I scroll down to a certain point, or on hover, or anything that doesn't make me feel like I'm trying to read through a strobe light.
I have had the exact experience in the last month. Being on a slow connection, I've come to loath web fonts. There is nothing wrong with them in general but it's just that they've come to symbolise over-indulgence and a myopia towards the users actual task-focused needs as opposed to aesthetics. Part of the issue is dealing with progressive enhancement as far as slow internet connections go. How do you solve that pro…
Besides, I'm used to my fonts. I know your fonts are a deliberate design choice, but I'm here for content. Maybe I'm just a neophyte, because I think a smaller cleaner website is better than a reactive design that has to constantly change to cram everything in. I don't care though, it's stupid when I have to wait 10 seconds for a page to load on my home connection because you've got so much crap going on, and all the while the content is jumping around like a frog with it's butt on fire.
If your site sucks, I'm not going to whine about it on twitter, I'm just going to stop visiting.
Fonts ought to have Subresource Integrity checksums, and clients should cache them effectively, even cross-site. It's not like they change much.
And then we get cache fingerprinting attacks :) But then again we already have canvas fingerprinting... why bother with anything else until the browsers fix that?
Not really. It all depends on how the cache is implemented. Maybe get an option for installing of a font or handle it like SSL and only install fonts from known, good actors which can be invalidated should one go bad.
Are there actually font blockers like ad blockers? That would solve the problem pretty easily for everybody who's annoyed. Although they probably won't be available for mobile browsers, where it's the most painful.