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Does anyone know whether this service generates any revenue for Google? I can’t see selling fonts data as something desirable by 3rd party companies but maybe that’s just me?
It does not, and they don't sell the data or use it for any tracking.
I was part of the team that founded this, about 10 years ago if memory serves. I'm still loosely involved, though no longer at Google. Inconsolata was one of the 20 fonts for the original launch, and we're now in the process of launching it as a variable font, with both width and weight axes. I'm also getting funding from them for Rust-based font tools. Feel free to AMA, though no guarantees I'll have good answers.
Is there a way to somehow proxy a subset of popular fonts locally rather than block the CDN entirely?
https://developers.google.com/web/fundamentals/design-and-ux...
Less overall file size, less HTTP requests. Combine that with preloading and font-display, we're getting to the point where webfonts aren't a giant bandwidth suck.
https://developers.google.com/web/fundamentals/performance/o...
(More room for ad tracking scripts instead!)
Does anyone know whether this service generates any revenue for Google? I can’t see selling fonts data as something desirable by 3rd party companies but maybe that’s just me?
It does not, and they don't sell the data or use it for any tracking.
More importantly though, it gives Google accurate insight into web traffic (many users block Google Analytics, but almost everyone loads web fonts), and it allows them to crawl websites more easily – before web fonts, many websites used pre-rendered PNGs to show web-unsafe fonts, which made crawling impossible.
Google has poured a lot of money into this, the fonts are free and open source, and the users aren't the product. Overall, I think it's a rare win-win story in this age of dystopian adtech.
Wow, if you used Google Cloud CDN to serve up that data, it would cost you more than $1 Billion USD.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If google embedded the top fonts in the browser this wouldn’t be an issue. I don’t understand why the font selection in browsers is so limited.
Practically there's no difference between a browser that lazily downloads builtin fonts, and a global URL for a font file across websites with an extremely long TTL. And you don't want the browsers to be even more bloated than they already are!
Caches are no longer shared across domains because doing so leads to privacy leaks: https://www.jefftk.com/p/shared-cache-is-going-away