Live data from Hacker News

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

pixelambacht.nl

141–150 of 156 posts

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

#141
post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Too bad you didn't have a legacy "flat design" from the early 90s still at hand, saves time when changing trends every 10-15 years..

That's how you can tell flat isn't just a trend - it's going back to what worked, after years of doing rounded corners and drop shadows because we can and never stopping to wonder whether we should. There's a lost decade in web design, but hopefully we're now starting to recover from it.

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

#143
post #90
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

A calculator for you, because I'm in pitch-my-side-project mode ;) https://instacalc.com/50060

On A serious note about the UI though, that red/green colour is awful for colourblind people. Didn't even realise there were two colours at first.

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

#144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

about:config browser.display.use_document_fonts=0

That will only work once designers start using SVG instead of icon fonts.

I've been blocking web fonts for a while, and it feels like I have to whitelist one site out of three because it depends on icon fonts.

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

#145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

Fonts are a pretty important factor in design. Most people may not explicitly notice it, but it certainly affects the impression they get from a website. You could compare it with http/2: If you do a survey, you won't find many people even knowing it. That doesn't mean it's useless to them.

This is an interesting comparison because web fonts have the opposite effect of HTTP/2: They introduce a huge delay between clicking a link and being allowed to actually read anything.

On 3G or shaky Wi-Fi, I've regularly given up on browser tabs because all I see is an empty page, even after half a minute of loading and when most images have finished downloading. (Maybe other browsers are better than Safari, but I won't switch just to see prettier fonts.)

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

#146
post #143
post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A calculator for you, because I'm in pitch-my-side-project mode ;) https://instacalc.com/50060

On A serious note about the UI though, that red/green colour is awful for colourblind people. Didn't even realise there were two colours at first.

I'm sure you mean - those are two different colours. If not, oh boy do I have news for you.

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

#147
post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

skip the `min` for production completely. use `fa.css` and if you want the expanded one for development, then you could have `fa.[max|debug|whatever].css`

Do you even need the ".css"? Just set the proper mime type in the server configuration

f

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

#148
post #143
post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A calculator for you, because I'm in pitch-my-side-project mode ;) https://instacalc.com/50060

On A serious note about the UI though, that red/green colour is awful for colourblind people. Didn't even realise there were two colours at first.

How would you work around this? Do browsers have a colorblind mode/header/whatever? Or should we just never use red/green combination?

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

#149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you moved your scripts to 1st party, uMatrix wouldn't block it

Writing this so that the owner of the site knows it affects more than one person.

Thanks for the feedback, I should test with that. I'm curious whether/if CDNs like google-hosted libraries are normally blocked.

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

#150
post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hah, yes, I'm that bad mamma jamma.

seriously, been using it for years, one of my favorite tools P.S. I'm sure you've looked into it but any plans for graphing capabilities?

It's awesome to hear when it's been a long-standing tool in the utility belt. The original version had charts/graphs (simple pie charts, etc.) which I need to bring back, were you considering more Wolfram-Alpha style 3d plots?
Post reply on HN