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Google Fonts Analytics

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Re: Google Fonts Analytics

#71

Post by raphlinus »

Bedon292 wrote: post #69

Might be a bit of a dumb question. But when I load google.com and look at the requests. It has fonts.google.com says 200 and 'from memory cache' is that actually sending a request in any way to Google? Or is that actually handled locally? Most of the time I am getting this, so not seeming to make actual requests to them the majority of the time. Is it actually hitting their servers for these tracking stats, or is som…

200 means it's hitting your cache and not doing any network requests. The analytics are based on actual HTTP requests. At the time I was there, we were only able to make rough guesses about the fraction of queries that were successful in the client cache, we didn't have any systematic way to dig into that.

Re: Google Fonts Analytics

#72

Post by jfkebwjsbx »

CoolGuySteve wrote: post #68
aloer wrote: post #56

The operating system stats are interesting. Looks like Macs have roughly a 17% share of the windows + mac total requests. The overall market share per wikipedia ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_share_of_personal_compu... ) is something like 7% for Apple. Fonts are probably used by most "normal" computer users in some way so I wonder where that difference comes from - windows breaks faster and must be replaced m…

Windows computers cost half as much, more or less, for the same specs so the replacement rate is probably much higher. Like for the same price you can buy a PC laptop every 2 years vs 1 Mac laptop every 4 years. When I worked at Apple, the plastic MacBooks outsold everything else because they were cheapest. It was weird that we did all our power/performance benchmarks on a $2000 15" MacBook Pro when they only made up…

Price has nothing to do with replacement rate. There are many bad laptop brands, though.

30% penetration in the USA. Here we are talking about global usage. In many other first-world countries Macs are nowhere to be seen, eg 3%.

Re: Google Fonts Analytics

#73

Post by est31 »

tobr wrote: post #27
penagwin wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think what they mean is why don't browsers just include the most popular fonts, so the underlying OS doesn't matter? Instead we're restricted to only a few fonts that actually have decent cross platform support.

The only way to do that would be to include particular typefaces as part of the CSS specification, rather than just the generic font-family keywords like “sans-serif” and “monospaced”. But who should pick them, which ones would they pick, and how would they be licensed? It’s kind of the same problem as saying that the browser should include common images. Which images? Why? How many?

> It’s kind of the same problem as saying that the browser should include common images. Which images? Why? How many?

Images follow a different usage distribution than fonts. I'd say that the top 100 fonts are enough to render most web content, for images I'd say this is obviously different, the top 100 images might appear often but not as often as the top 100 fonts.

Google is already distributing the equivalent for text, in the form of the brotli corpus which ships in every Chrome installation.

Re: Google Fonts Analytics

#74

Post by politelemon »

aloer wrote: post #56

The operating system stats are interesting. Looks like Macs have roughly a 17% share of the windows + mac total requests. The overall market share per wikipedia ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_share_of_personal_compu... ) is something like 7% for Apple. Fonts are probably used by most "normal" computer users in some way so I wonder where that difference comes from - windows breaks faster and must be replaced m…

The stats are interesting but do not warrant such a condescending/misrepresentative view; they could easily be twisted around, for example, to say

- Macos has broken browsers and doesn't cache, resulting in multiple font downloads per website browsing session.

- Macos use computers differently? Do they refresh the page multiple times racking up a download count?

The first odd thing about the stats is Linux's share; with a 2% market share it's racked up 10T downloads. A major part of that is Android based browsers, but a decent part of that will be Linux desktop users, developers, automation tests and so on. Overall we should expect users' browsing habits playing a part; there may be a large shift towards mobile/tablet web consumption and reduced desktop web consumption causing a stats skew.

Re: Google Fonts Analytics

#75

Post by CoolGuySteve »

jfkebwjsbx wrote: post #72
CoolGuySteve wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Windows computers cost half as much, more or less, for the same specs so the replacement rate is probably much higher. Like for the same price you can buy a PC laptop every 2 years vs 1 Mac laptop every 4 years. When I worked at Apple, the plastic MacBooks outsold everything else because they were cheapest. It was weird that we did all our power/performance benchmarks on a $2000 15" MacBook Pro when they only made up…

Price has nothing to do with replacement rate. There are many bad laptop brands, though. 30% penetration in the USA. Here we are talking about global usage. In many other first-world countries Macs are nowhere to be seen, eg 3%.

> 30% penetration in the USA. Here we are talking about global usage.

Then later in this same thread you say:

> Webpages in non-latin alphabets probably use way less fonts from Google Fonts.

So uh, which is it?

Re: Google Fonts Analytics

#76

Post by tim1994 »

mrspeaker wrote: post #33

I'd like to view web pages as the authors intend them, but I also don't want to send details logging to google on every page I visit. Is there a way to somehow proxy a subset of popular fonts locally rather than block the CDN entirely?

I think this should be added to the Decentraleyes extension (https://decentraleyes.org) which does this for popular JS frameworks. There is already an issue for this: https://git.synz.io/Synzvato/decentraleyes/issues/387

Re: Google Fonts Analytics

#77

Post by Symbiote »

jsnell wrote: post #16
boarnoah wrote: post #2

It looks like its lumping Android in with desktop linux. Since they are differentiating platforms by the user agent that seems like an easy thing to fix?

The OS table has entry for X11 with maybe 2-3% shaer; I'd bet that's desktop Linux.

That's an impressive figure. Macintosh (desktop Mac?) is slightly less than double the X11 figure.

https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share has Linux usage at just under 1%.

Re: Google Fonts Analytics

#78

Post by open-source-ux »

juandazapata wrote: post #67
rememberlenny wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I currently work on it as well, so happy to pitch in.

Does Google use this to fingerprint and track users across different websites?

The Google Font FAQ includes the question: What does using the Google Fonts API mean for the privacy of my users?

> "...your requests for fonts are separate from and do not contain any credentials you send to google.com while using other Google services that are authenticated, such as Gmail."

>"Google Fonts logs records of the CSS and the font file requests, and access to this data is kept secure."

https://developers.google.com/fonts/faq#what_does_using_the_...

Re: Google Fonts Analytics

#79

Post by Lammy »

tim1994 wrote: post #76
mrspeaker wrote: post #33

I'd like to view web pages as the authors intend them, but I also don't want to send details logging to google on every page I visit. Is there a way to somehow proxy a subset of popular fonts locally rather than block the CDN entirely?

I think this should be added to the Decentraleyes extension ( https://decentraleyes.org ) which does this for popular JS frameworks. There is already an issue for this: https://git.synz.io/Synzvato/decentraleyes/issues/387

I love Decentraleyes but how would they redistribute most web fonts without running afoul of their licenses?

Re: Google Fonts Analytics

#80

Post by basseq »

penagwin wrote: post #20
basseq wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Font selection in browsers isn't limited. Browsers don't have embedded fonts—they rely on whatever fonts are installed in the operating system. The challenge is that to ensure consistency, you need to use the "lowest common denominator" of fonts that are installed by default across all operating systems . Which leaves you with (like) Arial, Times, Courier, Verdana, Georgia, Palatino, and (hahahaha) Comic Sans. The re…

I think what they mean is why don't browsers just include the most popular fonts, so the underlying OS doesn't matter? Instead we're restricted to only a few fonts that actually have decent cross platform support.

> why don't browsers just include the most popular fonts, so the underlying OS doesn't matter?

Well, pontificating here:

1. Because many applications don't ship with additional fonts, and it's an additional layer of complexity. Some do—Microsoft Word comes to mind, IIRC.

2. Because you're still left with the same problem: unless all browsers can agree on an additional set of standard fonts, you as a web developer will only want to use those installed by Chrome and Edge and Safari and Firefox.

3. Because licensing for desktop application may (?) be more of a pain than licensing for web usage. Which may not matter for Google Fonts, since they may be the license holder for all anyway. I don't know.

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