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Self-host your fonts for better performance

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Re: Self-host your fonts for better performance

#381

Post by gumby »

LukeShu wrote: post #347
gumby wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am a software developer; why would I want to "take myself down a peg"? Also I doubt there are many people reading the web on 2004 netbooks. You know what I am talking about.

1. I believe the parent post was referring to non-web-developers taking web-developers down a peg, not anyone taking themselves down a peg. 2. I used a small 2007 laptop well in to 2018, and I believe that the software I wrote was better for it.

I must have missed the tweet where web developers were declared cooler than other developers — or was the other way around? I can’t even fathom who is being impugned here, though clearly somebody is quite upset.

Re: Self-host your fonts for better performance

#382

Post by coliveira »

d1zzy wrote: post #356
coliveira wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 tha…

That's a theory without data to back it up. Especially in technology, where big innovation usually comes from small to medium sized companies. What smaller companies cannot do is coerce the market to extract profits at the level done by Google and their pears. That's why we need anti-trust legislation.

Re: Self-host your fonts for better performance

#383

Post by frosas »

hcnews wrote: post #39
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…

How does one do this for chrome/firefox? Google search gives result for the opposite problem.

This worked for me on Chrome: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25305835

Re: Self-host your fonts for better performance

#384

Post by danielheath »

jfk13 wrote: post #225
danielheath wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“No web fonts for elements containing multiple characters” would be a great ublock rule, now I think about it...

That'd break sites that use ligature-based icon fonts, with the actual content being an icon identifier like "thumbs-up" and an OpenType ligature rule in the font to render this as an icon glyph.

Ahh good point. Not sure if I have seen one of those used before; they seem to have a good fallback though.

Re: Self-host your fonts for better performance

#385

Post by hda2 »

Tanath wrote: post #367
sergeykish wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Many of us still us just use the latest version of uMatrix on addons.firefox.com. Nothing else comes close to giving you the same kind of control.

Re: Self-host your fonts for better performance

#386

Post by eyelidlessness »

tekromancr wrote: post #289
eyelidlessness wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

So? You are just describing how discourse works. Entity A does thing that impacts entity B. Entity B makes those effects known to a broader group than entity B. Maybe entity A does thing about it, maybe not.

I’m describing a situation where a certain set of opinions is insatiable because sating any subset thirsts another.

Re: Self-host your fonts for better performance

#387

Post by forgotmypw17 »

bee_rider wrote: post #336
gumby wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The same argument applies to developers not using the state of the art computers packed with RAM. These problems can't be found in QA: if they even show up at all it's too late. 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.

Whatever excuses we want to make for forcing web devs to use old netbooks from 2004, I'm down with it (everyone knows they think they're cooler than us, we need to knock them down a notch). Usability? Cool yes that sounds very important or whatever.

It's exactly what I've been doing, give or take a few years. I also take the time to boot up my Win95 VM and test in IE3, Netscape in Wine, Lynx, w3m, and many others, with and without JS.

The result is designs I can actually be proud of, not ashamed.

Of course, no one is paying me for it. And that's OK. I'd rather be doing this for frew than getting six figures working on advertising bullshit which will be gone tomorrow.

Re: Self-host your fonts for better performance

#388

Post by forgotmypw17 »

sneak wrote: post #100
_a1_ wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm using uMatrix and by default all javascripts are blacklisted until I explicitly enable it for the site. The downside of this is that lots of websites are broken, payment sites are non-functional, but after a week of building the whitelist, the web is somehow usable again.

The worst is when the site is totally blank without it, then you enable it, and there's no interactivity: just images and a few words of text. It was totally unnecessary after all.

That's why I stopped enabling it.

Because I've noticed a strong correlation with lack of accessibility and poor quality content I ended up regretting wasting my time reading.

Re: Self-host your fonts for better performance

#389

Post by forgotmypw17 »

com2kid wrote: post #323
ardy42 wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> 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. I used to work at MS, and a lot of people don't realize exactly how much time, money, and love is put into fonts there. When my team ordered custom fonts, I personally spent a lot of time going over each character pixel by pixel, in combination with many other cha…

This is why I still use Word 97 for writing.

Re: Self-host your fonts for better performance

#390

Post by ori_b »

ashtonkem wrote: post #304
ori_b wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's also likely to be implemented as a ton of JS to download, which would either block rendering (see option 1 above), or apply after the content loaded (see option 2). So, a bunch of work to fix something that isn't broken when you turn off webfonts and respect user settings.

With an isomorphic web app, that should be calculated server side.

Using what screen size, page zoom level, and font rendering engine?
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