Saving the Internet 2000TB a Day: Fixing Font Awesome’s Fonts

Post by spectre » Fri, Dec 09, 2016, 8:51 PM UTC

Zelmor wrote: post #108

One of the quoted sources is titled >How Font Awesome 5 Became Kickstarter’s Most Funded Software Project I checked their kickstarter, however. >35,550 backers pledged $1,076,960 to help bring this project to life. Pillars of Eternity, most assuredly software, was a kickstarter I backed. Their campaign page reads to this day: >73,986 backers pledged $3,986,929 to help bring this project to life. Why make up such a sh…

Post by adrianN » Fri, Dec 09, 2016, 9:00 PM UTC

Spooky23 wrote: post #32

Klathmon wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a deceptively hard problem to solve. installing a ton of fonts up front takes a pretty significant amount of space, installing a subset for their language/preference or letting the user manage it makes it VERY easy to fingerprint users based on what fonts they download, and doing any kind of cross-origin long-term caching is a security nightmare as it lets you begin to map out where a user has been just based on…

Exactly, but I would take it further... It solves a problem that people other than web designers care very little about, but costs me money and creates a slew of other problems... Personally, I wish it was easy to just turn off!

Post by koliber » Fri, Dec 09, 2016, 9:05 PM UTC

kasparsklavins wrote: post #40

koliber wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By renaming the CSS file from `font-awesome.min.css` to `fa.min.css` they could save 660GB a day: 73,000,000 sites * 1000 visitors * 10 bytes / 1024^3

`fa` would basically be free for gzip because the icons use fa as a class name.

Post by mark-r » Fri, Dec 09, 2016, 9:16 PM UTC

pixelambacht wrote: post #88

jsnell wrote: post #28

Is the 2000TB/day number reasonable, or just clickbait? It's all based on coming up with two numbers that when multiplied say that this resource is downloaded 73 billion times a day. That's 20 times / day for every internet user (even those using it on a 2G connection once a year). Given a reasonable caching period of 1 month, that'd mean the average user visits 600 different sites a month. That seems like much more…

I can put your mind at ease: I took a bit of poetic-mathematic license with that number. I figured that the big sites and the small sites together would average a perfect 1000 fresh-cache vistors a day, but in all probability I'm off by at least 3 or 291 visitors :)

Post by dualogy » Fri, Dec 09, 2016, 9:37 PM UTC

kalid wrote: post #99

richfnelson wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's pretty neat idea. The site's missing a cute calculator favicon though, which destroyed my UX.

Hah, I just finished a flat redesign from mid-2000s skeuomorphic interface. Redoing the logo / favicons is that last thing...