Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Google Fonts Analytics

fonts.google.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 191 posts

Re: Google Fonts Analytics

#81

Post by lotyrin »

politelemon wrote: post #74
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; w…

Any time CI hits a site with these fonts integrated an ephemeral session (no cache) probably has to download them.

Re: Google Fonts Analytics

#82

Post by McDyver »

open-source-ux wrote: post #78
juandazapata wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

So a lot of fluff and no actual reply. Users can be tracked without cookies being sent, while "access to the data is kept secure". Call me a cynic, but I lost my trust in google a long time ago.

Re: Google Fonts Analytics

#83

Post by DannyCooper »

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?

You could download the fonts to your machine(s). That way they will be served locally rather than connecting to fonts.googleapis.com

https://fontsplugin.com/how-to-download-google-fonts/

Re: Google Fonts Analytics

#84

Post by half-kh-hacker »

Symbiote wrote: post #77
jsnell wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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%.

I would hazard a guess that more Linux users are blocking the ad networks that StatCounter utilizes to collect their data than Linux users that block requests to fonts.google.com.

Re: Google Fonts Analytics

#85

Post by twhb »

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…

There are Windows machines for high end and low end, but macOS machines only for high end. Low end includes all your grandmas, unused workstations, and people apathetic about computers because they don't use them much. All your laptops kept folded under dorm beds and used only for assignments.

The same effect shows up to a greater degree on mobile, where Android has something like three times iOS’s units sold yet the same amount of mobile traffic and half as much app store revenue.

Re: Google Fonts Analytics

#86

Post by saurik »

McDyver wrote: post #82
open-source-ux wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

So a lot of fluff and no actual reply. Users can be tracked without cookies being sent, while "access to the data is kept secure". Call me a cynic, but I lost my trust in google a long time ago.

Multiple people (I know as my upvote just now didn't even get you back in the black) downvoted you (and now me ;P), but you are absolutely correct that that quote didn't really have anything to do with the question.

Re: Google Fonts Analytics

#87

Post by moftz »

LukeBMM wrote: post #65
thrownaway954 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

how much space would packing all those fonts take up?

With some extra metadata, about 428MB. https://github.com/google/fonts Since the browser hands font rendering off to the operating system, however, the most pertinent browser-specific adjustment would be updating the (configurable) defaults (Serif, Sans-serif, etc...) for each supported platform - Georgia instead of Times for a default, for example.

You bundle the top 10 most popular fonts and save about half the traffic: counter is ticking about 20M per minute or 201B per week, top 10 fonts were used 136B times this week, Chrome is about 3/4 of users. Bundling would save (136/201)*(3/4) = about 1/2. However, Google would lose about half of their tracking events so I'm sure they've already thought of this and figured the data is worth more than the traffic expenses.

Re: Google Fonts Analytics

#88

Post by BiteCode_dev »

raphlinus wrote: post #44
dt3ft wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Was this created in order to track users across different sites or because google wanted to make the world a better place? :)

The latter.

Do you think it's still used for the latter rather than the former now?

Re: Google Fonts Analytics

#89

Post by zelly »

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…

It depends on the cache control headers sent by the original asset. If you want to make sure you don't hit the CDN, install the Decentraleyes browser extension.
Post reply on HN