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

Self-host your fonts for better performance

wicki.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

261–270 of 417 posts

Re: Self-host your fonts for better performance

#261

Post by bmn__ »

ce4 wrote: post #59
dm319 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you tried something like uMatrix? If you use it in the denylisting mode, it doesn't seem to impact much on my web browsing experience. By default it is in allowlist mode, which means it's speedy to open pages, but you run into trouble quite quickly. I really can't stand browsing the web without it.

What is the maintenance status of uMatrix? I haven't checked recently, my most up to date info is that Gorhill left it due to too many bogus issues filed on Github.

Just use uBlock Origin.

https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Per-site-switches#no-...

Re: Self-host your fonts for better performance

#262

Post by eyelidlessness »

fiddlerwoaroof wrote: post #259
eyelidlessness wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they didn’t do this you (or someone with similar attitudes) would be complaining that cross site caching allows fingerprinting and violates privacy (which is almost certainly why they did do this).

Yeah, however, they could make these things configuration rather than imposing a policy on every user: in different contexts different privacy/performance tradeoffs are acceptable

And then the criticism would be “Google enables violating the privacy of rural and poor customers with less access to high speed Internet”. I’m not saying any one of these criticisms is wrong. Just that they’re predictable and there’s basically no move Google could make besides shutting down that would satisfy the complaints (and even then it would be the ultimate “Google kills products” meme).

Re: Self-host your fonts for better performance

#263

Post by ape4 »

throwaway894345 wrote: post #256
ape4 wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You'd think there should be some technical solution to avoid the privacy issues of this. Eg make it always take one second or something.

The whole point of caching in the first place is to make things take less time when possible. That would be a strictly worse solution than self-hosting if performance is your most important outcome.

Perhaps a very limited set of response times. Increments of 1/10 of second.

Re: Self-host your fonts for better performance

#264

Post by athenot »

eyelidlessness wrote: post #249
sslayer wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At this point Big Tech is no different than Big Government and just as out of touch with those forced to live with it's decisions.

If they didn’t do this you (or someone with similar attitudes) would be complaining that cross site caching allows fingerprinting and violates privacy (which is almost certainly why they did do this).

If that's true, then it seems like moat-buidling since Google most certainly engages in user fingerprinting for their own ad platform.

Re: Self-host your fonts for better performance

#265

Post by SoSoRoCoCo »

robin_reala wrote: post #24
test1235 wrote: post #5

I'm usually the first one to sneer in disbelief at super users who 'go nuclear' and disable the likes of javascript and images when browsing the web, but lately, I've been experimenting with having custom fonts disabled (that is, fonts I don't have locally), and it feels to me that page loads are much faster, and in some case more readable (pages feel 'cleaner'?). The only issues I've come across so far is when a sit…

If you want a really fast web experience, try disabling images and javascript too! (on rereading this I sounded sarcastic, but I really wasn’t trying to be)

I've been trying this every few years since browsers started supporting JavaScript and allowing users to disable it (back in the days before extensions and config options), and every time more and more of the web breaks w/o JSscript. 100% of the websites I need for work use JScript.

Re: Self-host your fonts for better performance

#266

Post by asdfasgasdgasdg »

athenot wrote: post #264
eyelidlessness wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they didn’t do this you (or someone with similar attitudes) would be complaining that cross site caching allows fingerprinting and violates privacy (which is almost certainly why they did do this).

If that's true, then it seems like moat-buidling since Google most certainly engages in user fingerprinting for their own ad platform.

This is exactly the type of damned if you do damned if you don't carping that GP was calling out.

Re: Self-host your fonts for better performance

#269

Post by jaywalk »

mhils wrote: post #237
ffpip wrote: post #220

FYI Google fonts are also loaded from the google.com domain. They can associate your login cookies with every page you visit. As you can see, it is very sneaky by using CNAME Cloaking - https://i.imgur.com/VB2DB75.png The request is to fonts.gstatic.com, but it resolves to gstaticadssl.l.google.com Tracking using CNAME cloacking - https://medium.com/nextdns/cname-cloaking-the-dangerous-disg...

Correct me if I'm wrong, but a CNAME "redirect" on the DNS level does not change the page origin. `fonts.gstatic.com` will only get the cookies set for `fonts.gstatic.com`, even if it is CNAMEd to a different domain.

You are correct.

Re: Self-host your fonts for better performance

#270

Post by robertoandred »

metalforever wrote: post #203
arcturus17 wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How has the web been subverted? By whom? And which notable, useful old tecnologies have been discarded? The capabilities of the web have only been expanded. You can still build websites in Django and Rails and myriad other "old-school" technologies. What are you missing? Perl and CGI? To the point of this article, you can perfectly build a website with self-hosted fonts, or with default system fonts. Is this what "lo…

This comment touches on some points which don't make sense from an engineering perspective. Different tools for different use cases. You can't throw the baby out with the bathwater and choose SPAs for every single application. They still perform poorly with SEO and people with disabilities that need a screen reader. It's not black and white (good or bad). Also, using Django and Rails are hardly the same as using Perl…

Nothing about SPAs hurts screen readers.
Post reply on HN