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Self-host your fonts for better performance

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Re: Self-host your fonts for better performance

#361

Post by hanspeter »

flomo wrote: post #352
jakub_g wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.)

Aside from Arial, which core fonts are still used widely?

Re: Self-host your fonts for better performance

#362

Post by ashtonkem »

fiddlerwoaroof wrote: post #307
ashtonkem wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To a first order approximation, nobody actually changes any of these advanced settings. The default is what most people use, and most settings might as well never exist.

Sure, but the people that do change get these settings are people too, and they’re often the type of people that will be vocal about your product and recommend it to people.

1) “There is a setting” is a good way to deflect from the more difficult job of making decisions about what the product should do.

2) Every setting comes with an opportunity cost. More than one product has died under a morasse of way too many configuration flags, or focused on features to please a minority of users at the cost of the product itself.

3) The group that says they want the setting is always bigger than the group that will actually use the setting.

Re: Self-host your fonts for better performance

#363

Post by colejohnson66 »

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.

If they provide it in Chrome, there’s no reason they couldn’t track that stuff even without Google Fonts being bundled. The browser already knows every site you visit. Knowing you visited example.com that used “Example Sans” doesn’t give anything more than just knowing you visited example.com.

Bundling with browsers outside of Chrome would be a different story, but Google has no say over that anyways.

Re: Self-host your fonts for better performance

#364

Post by colejohnson66 »

d1zzy wrote: post #357
mthoms wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I can’t see it as being true because Chrome already knows what sites you visit. Bundling the fonts wouldn’t change that.

Re: Self-host your fonts for better performance

#365

Post by swyx »

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.

these are known as system font stacks, and i've collected a bunch of them here: https://github.com/sw-yx/spark-joy#typography

Re: Self-host your fonts for better performance

#366

Post by ben509 »

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…

> The secret of democracy is that, even when there are no good options to choose from, people agreed on the solution.

No, a plurality of people agreed on the solution, and everyone else disagreed with it but was stuck with it.

> Therefore you are not a the whim of a single person or entity and this legitimates the way you live.

Now you're at the whim of a popularity contest.

Re: Self-host your fonts for better performance

#367

Post by Tanath »

sergeykish wrote: post #325
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…

There are so many solutions! * In uBlock Origin (which is a must have on bad internet): Settings > Block remote fonts * In browser, Firefox about:config, gfx.downloadable_fonts.enabled, Chrome run with --disable-remote-fonts * Download fonts when on good connection > You can download all Google Fonts in a simple ZIP snapshot (over 300MB) > https://github.com/google/fonts installation depends on OS, on Arch Linux it w…

Are you just clinging to the last dev version of uMatrix, or did you find an active fork or something?

Re: Self-host your fonts for better performance

#368

Post by Tanath »

bmn__ wrote: post #261
ce4 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-...

Not nearly as good.

Re: Self-host your fonts for better performance

#369

Post by rendall »

drummer wrote: post #267
timdaub wrote: post #95

There's another benefit in self-hosting, which is that Google will stop tracking your users on the web!

Do they actually track users based on their fonts being loaded from their site?

Let's think it through together. What can be tracked from that?

IP address, which can be linked to an individual. Origin / Referer. Is that it? Does google analytics add request headers?

So, at least "this individual visited this site at this time"

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