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

351–360 of 417 posts

Re: Self-host your fonts for better performance

#351

Post by dredmorbius »

mthoms wrote: post #308
tux1968 wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google could at least globally cache all the fonts when Chrome is installed; a one time download which is then available for use on all sites. If they licensed other browsers to do the same, the number of fonts available to designers would be large without the performance hit.

Good idea, except that the purpose of Google fonts (from Google's perspective) is to provide another means of tracking what sites people are visiting. Maybe a browser extension can do this though.

Hanlon's Handgun strikes again:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21691282

Re: Self-host your fonts for better performance

#352

Post by flomo »

jakub_g wrote: post #156
dubcanada wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean I’ve said it before but shipping like 20 (montserrat, raleway, open sans, etc) would cover most websites who use Google Fonts.

You might be right, but the next question is fashion. Will the same fonts be used still in 5 years, or (more likely) the new hotness will arrive? Should the browsers update the list each year? Then some fonts that were available will suddenly be not? Not so great. Web standards and browser features are generally built for the long term and backward compatibility. I mean, it's not impossible to find a solution, but it…

Microsoft's old "core fonts for the web" are still widely in use. (including here on HN.)

Re: Self-host your fonts for better performance

#353

Post by harrisonjackson »

vbezhenar wrote: post #328
harrisonjackson wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the google fonts FAQ it says they will use the locally installed font if possible https://developers.google.com/fonts/faq#can_i_download_the_f... > Note that when browsers render websites that use the Google Fonts API, they will check if a font is installed locally on your computer, and prefer to use the local version over web fonts.

Here's snippet from CSS served to my browser: https://fonts.googleapis.com/css2?family=Inconsolata&display... @font-face { font-family: 'Inconsolata'; ... src: url(https://fonts.gstatic.com/s/inconsolata/....woff2) format('woff2'); unicode-range: U+0000-00FF, ...;

Wow! That used to not be the case. I can't find anything about the change but it used to include a check for local(font-face) in the sources.

Some random references to it w/ the snippets:

https://stackoverflow.com/a/52413970

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/18303215/how-can-i-preve...

https://github.com/google/fonts/issues/2620

Re: Self-host your fonts for better performance

#354

Post by jaquers »

colejohnson66 wrote: post #199
robscallsign wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I live in a rural area with bad internet, and the trend to load all of these external fonts, images and javascript externally over https basically makes the web unusable for us. The overhead of the handshakes required by the https connection greatly increased the page load time, and there is about a 1-in-4 chance of one of them timing out and not loading, so as a result the page doesn't load properly or pauses and st…

Wasn’t the point of Google Fonts that your browser would have in its cache fonts from Google so it wouldn’t download multiple copies from all over the place? A CDN basically. I know jQuery and Bootstrap recommend using their CDNs so browsers have the copy in their cache. Of course, there’s always the tracking ability, but that’s inherent to every CDN.

Did you read the article?

Re: Self-host your fonts for better performance

#355

Post by dang »

crazygringo wrote: post #255

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. :(

Ok, we've replaced the baity title with a representative phrase from the article body.

Re: Self-host your fonts for better performance

#356

Post by d1zzy »

coliveira wrote: post #338
geofft wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, the nature of the problem is that Google (and big government, in its own ways) is trying to solve hard problems with no good solution . There are clear downsides (described in this thread) to all the possible options, and even the option of letting people choose between bad options doesn't actually make people's lives better at the end of the day. Keep in mind that Chrome basically pioneered the concept of doing…

The secret of democracy is that, even when there are no good options to choose from, people agreed on the solution. Therefore you are not a the whim of a single person or entity and this legitimates the way you live. As for technology existing only because of Google or some other large company, that's not the case. Google was more innovative when it was smaller. Netscape created the whole browser industry as a small…

There are many problems that cannot be solved by the resources available to a medium sized company. Which is why you need multiple governments to get together to help out something like AirBus or space programs.

Similarly Google at its scale can tackle large problems more efficiently than having 10000 medium sized companies pool their resources together to do the same.

In other words, everything has pros and cons that depend on each particular situation. Large companies aren't "all bad" and small companies aren't "all good", you just chose to give lower priority (or ignore) ti the bad aspects of small companies while showing concern with the bad aspects of large companies.

Re: Self-host your fonts for better performance

#357

Post by d1zzy »

mthoms wrote: post #308
tux1968 wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google could at least globally cache all the fonts when Chrome is installed; a one time download which is then available for use on all sites. If they licensed other browsers to do the same, the number of fonts available to designers would be large without the performance hit.

Good idea, except that the purpose of Google fonts (from Google's perspective) is to provide another means of tracking what sites people are visiting. Maybe a browser extension can do this though.

That's a bold assertion, care to back that up?

Re: Self-host your fonts for better performance

#358

Post by tomcam »

cratermoon wrote: post #277
cpach wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It isn’t :)

It's rent-seeking if, instead of selling you the font once under a mutually agreeable license, they charge you an ongoing fee to "use" the font under conditions that the foundry controls and can change without re-negotiating the contract. This is especially true if the condition are "you can use for purposes x, y, and z, but if you want to use it for a, b, or c you have to pay a higher rate".

How can they charge you if you don’t agree to the contract?

Re: Self-host your fonts for better performance

#359

Post by sergeykish »

tannhaeuser wrote: post #10

It's infuriating to see so much web tech being discarded created during the 90s and 00s in good faith, just because the web was subverted into an app delivery platform (in this case, shared caches were obsoleted by timing attacks) and the arms race for ever more crap to counter the negative effects, insufficiently. The web may now be a platform to lock-in and enslave users; just isn't anymore a recommendable place fo…

Tech is there, I can write static pages like it is 90s and upload to Google Cloud with gsutil, that's not much different from FTP:

    My awesome site!
    
Under construction
I browse without JS by default last ten years, it works fine, but it is niche. Today's web is so much more. Just look at Youtube, it is incredible. I've recently started playing Ukulele, so much data there.

Re: Self-host your fonts for better performance

#360

Post by buu700 »

city41 wrote: post #165
donbrae wrote: post #15

Mainly for performance reasons I've recently gone from using hosted/local Google Fonts to just calling the system ones (some variant of `-apple-system,BlinkMacSystemFont,Segoe UI,Roboto,Oxygen,Ubuntu,Cantarell,Open Sans,Helvetica Neue`).

Seems most css frameworks are defaulting to this now. The only problem is Ubuntu is a very ugly font that looks very different from the others. At my previous job I was one of the only Linux users (using Ubuntu) and some designers were shocked how bad their designs looked on my computer due to the Ubuntu font. We removed Ubuntu from the list and just went with sans serif instead.

I like Ubuntu personally (we used it for the Cyph logo), but not as an alternative to sans serif. I mean it's great for some things like headers, but I wouldn't choose to read a whole document printed in Ubuntu; that sounds terrible.
Post reply on HN