AFAIK it hasn't "added support". We've used material icons for a year or two now from Google Fonts. Good to see this getting adoption but it's been available for some time
Icons – Google Fonts
11–20 of 190 posts
Re: Icons – Google Fonts
#12So now users need to download several megabytes of font to display check marks and search icons or is there something I’m misunderstanding?
It is a 42KB file for 600 icons.
And which would additionally, I assume, replace the use of bitmaps.
I'm surprised this question was even raised because vector graphics is the most size efficient way to do simple graphics on the web.
Re: Icons – Google Fonts
#13Are Google serious? Simultaneously pushing websites to be highly efficient (Core Web Vitals), at the same time as introducing the methods that can make them less efficient. Also, about these icons, they mention "please don’t try to sell them", immediately followed by "Apache license 2.0". Well, Google, which is it? Do they actually mean to say "you have permission to sell them, but please don't?"
You'd prefer Google throw them under a proprietary license instead of asking nicely?
Re: Icons – Google Fonts
#14Regular reminder that icon fonts are bad for accessibility and are technically troublesome also in other ways: https://github.blog/2016-02-22-delivering-octicons-with-svg/
Re: Icons – Google Fonts
#15So now users need to download several megabytes of font to display check marks and search icons or is there something I’m misunderstanding?
From the developer guide: > The icon font weighs in at only 42KB in its smallest woff2 format and 56KB in standard woff format. By comparison, the SVG files compressed with gzip will generally be around 62KB in size, but this can be reduced considerably by compiling only the icons you need into a single SVG file with symbol sprites. So not that large, but I still prefer SVG icons.
It's nice that they provide a git repo for this font with all the icons in SVG format
Re: Icons – Google Fonts
#16Are Google serious? Simultaneously pushing websites to be highly efficient (Core Web Vitals), at the same time as introducing the methods that can make them less efficient. Also, about these icons, they mention "please don’t try to sell them", immediately followed by "Apache license 2.0". Well, Google, which is it? Do they actually mean to say "you have permission to sell them, but please don't?"
You'd prefer Google throw them under a proprietary license instead of asking nicely?
I don’t care since the icon font approach is technically inferior to SVG icons: it’s monochrome only, whereas SVG supports colors and transparency.
Icon fonts also suffer from a plethora of rendering issues across platforms because fonts are usually rendered with speedy display of long text in mind.
It’s strange Google would invest in a years-old kludge tech.
Re: Icons – Google Fonts
#17Are Google serious? Simultaneously pushing websites to be highly efficient (Core Web Vitals), at the same time as introducing the methods that can make them less efficient. Also, about these icons, they mention "please don’t try to sell them", immediately followed by "Apache license 2.0". Well, Google, which is it? Do they actually mean to say "you have permission to sell them, but please don't?"
You'd prefer Google throw them under a proprietary license instead of asking nicely?
y...yes? they should use an appropriate license
Re: Icons – Google Fonts
#18Are Google serious? Simultaneously pushing websites to be highly efficient (Core Web Vitals), at the same time as introducing the methods that can make them less efficient. Also, about these icons, they mention "please don’t try to sell them", immediately followed by "Apache license 2.0". Well, Google, which is it? Do they actually mean to say "you have permission to sell them, but please don't?"
You'd prefer Google throw them under a proprietary license instead of asking nicely?
They can ask nicely, but I expect it will have very little bearing on how people use these. Determining how things get used is what licenses are for.
Re: Icons – Google Fonts
#19The provided usage example is bad for accessibility: the name of the icon, e.g. ”check_circle”, will be announced by screen readers. If there is other contextual information that explains the icon, the icon can be hidden from screen readers using aria-hidden=”true”. However, in cases where the icon appears stand-alone, it needs to contain a human-understandable text that explains its meaning. Also, never use Google’s…
“Check-circle” is exactly the amount of information that the able reader has. Sight-deficient users are as much used to those weird words as able users are used to unintelligible icons.
Re: Icons – Google Fonts
#20I have Google Fonts blocked in uBlock Origin now, and it's really helped pages load quicker and feel more snappy.
I added these lines to uBlock:
fonts.gstatic.com
fonts.googleapis.com