311–320 of 417 posts
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I've sped up sites before by using inline svg rather than icon fonts - downloading an entire icon font for a few icons is inefficient when the actual SVG needed for those icons is < 1Kb and is waaay faster as inline SVG.
It's only faster on the first load. On all subsequent loads its slower and consumes more bandwidth. I find this irresponsible.
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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.
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I HATED sites that used custom fonts when I lived in the country. There are only two ways loading such a site goes: a) you get to stare at a blank page for a couple minutes while the font downloads, if it downloads at all. (this seemed to be google's favorite way to screw over people with bad connections; acknowledgment that it's going to suck and doing it anyway) b) you get two minutes into reading the page only for…
Re: (b): I know there’s a MathJax clone that works around the constant reformatting by precalculating the sizes of the various blocks and putting that into the HTML. So your browser basically makes a big empty placeholder box that the renderer will render into. It’d be neat if something like that were available for web fonts. Each paragraph gets its own “block” that the installed font uses (and contains padding), and…
Maybe I'm being naïve, but why don't browsers ship with more popular fonts bundled to avoid problems like these? I have no issue with any of my browsers taking up fractionally more space for an extensive cache of the most popular web fonts when the payoff is better performance on so many sites. Of course, servers should still be capable of serving the fonts that the client requires to render the content correctly, bu…
Because web tech (and Google in particular) is a mess of weird politics. There are some things that are really well executed, and other things where the ball gets dropped completely. Chrome will come along and do something like hide parts of the url, or allow scroll-jacking, but then say that fonts should probably be a system level implementation. It would be trivial for the chrome team to establish something like a…
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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
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…
> 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'?). That might be due to font hinting. The default fonts (on Windows) were beautifully manually hinted to give a really crisp results without font smoothing. But manual font hinting is super expensive, so web fonts do…
It'd be more overhead of course, and basically the opposite of what this thread is about, but it's something I'd be interested in. I'd love to be able to choose a font without things getting mangled.
Title is very misleading and sensationalistic. It's about keeping Google Fonts ( not saying goodbye!) but simply self-hosting them instead of using Google's CDN for better performance. Seems like the author's trying to bait us by making us first assume Google's canceling the product, or that Google's done something scandalous so we should avoid it. :(
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From TFA: > Since Chrome v86, released October 2020, cross-site resources like fonts can’t be shared on the same CDN anymore. This is due to the partitioned browser cache
Which is one of the many reasons I've stopped the almost hourly updates of Chrome. I feel fo people that have bad bandwidth or poor wireless connections. One of my favorite rants if web builders and more importantly the managers of team that build websites were forced to use a DSL speed level connection daily a lot of the cruft would go away.
Sure, their code will compile faster but they won't get a feel for how it behaves in the real world. Probably the best is to have fast build servers on the LAN while typing at pedestrian machines.
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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
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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.