Blocking web fonts for speed and privacy (2016)
collinmbarrett.com
Blocking web fonts for speed and privacy (2016)
1–10 of 146 posts
Re: Blocking web fonts for speed and privacy (2016)
#2Mirror: https://archive.ph/RxqoH (site seems to be chugging already)
Re: Blocking web fonts for speed and privacy (2016)
#3iOS' Lockdown Mode blocks web fonts. Sad to see how many sites still use icon fonts instead of SVGs.
Re: Blocking web fonts for speed and privacy (2016)
#4iOS' Lockdown Mode blocks web fonts. Sad to see how many sites still use icon fonts instead of SVGs.
The method in the article also turns Reddit's upvote/downvote buttons into squares (unknown characters).
Re: Blocking web fonts for speed and privacy (2016)
#5iOS' Lockdown Mode blocks web fonts. Sad to see how many sites still use icon fonts instead of SVGs.
As someone who knows nothing about this: what is wrong with icon fonts?
Re: Blocking web fonts for speed and privacy (2016)
#6iOS' Lockdown Mode blocks web fonts. Sad to see how many sites still use icon fonts instead of SVGs.
they do have the advantage of being easy to recolor even as an external resource. I personally don't use them and instead use SVGs and there's always the decision of whether to add a bunch of inline svgs, which you can do cool effects and even transitions on for hover effects or light/dark mode, or using external images, which are nicer in terms of separation of concerns, re-use without having to update multiple places and not having graphics buried in the source code somewhere. It would be cool if we could even just have a simple CSS filter that replaces all non transparent parts of an externally embedded image with a single color.
of course there's other benefits like just having to load one file for all your icons, although the tradeoff is also that fonts are messier to update if you're doing custom stuff and not just fontawesome
Re: Blocking web fonts for speed and privacy (2016)
#7>Additionally, most of the time web fonts are downloaded from a third-party delivery network such as Google Web Fonts or Adobe Fonts. One of the advantages of using these systems is that the likelihood that a visitor’s browser already has a font cached locally from a previous visit to any other site using the same font is relatively high.
That likelihood is relatively low (though not as low as JS CDNs). Modern browsers explicitly forbid sharing cache entries across websites; so the likelihood is zero now.
>There are some privacy concerns when your browser makes the link to the font network’s domain. While they deny the practice, these services have the ability of profiling your browser (using browser fingerprinting with your IP address and HTTP referer header) to track what sites you visit, building a valuable profile about you that they could sell to marketers.
Also, if you're in the EU, this constitutes an illegal GDPR data export if the company running the CDN has any amount of American ownership.
My personal opinion is that instead of blocking Google Web Fonts, we should have an extension with the entire Google Web Fonts library preloaded in it, that transparently redirects every font lookup to its local cache. This neatly fixes the privacy problems and makes all CDN fonts load super fast.
Re: Blocking web fonts for speed and privacy (2016)
#8I find it somewhat amusing that this is one setting that IE has always had in its GUI: https://i0.wp.com/improveandrepeat.com/wp-content/uploads/20...
Firefox has this setting built-in, gfx.downloadable_fonts.enabled and browser.display.use_document_fonts, but AFAIK it's not configurable via GUI by default.
Chrome hides it even deeper in a command-line option, --disable-remote-fonts
Re: Blocking web fonts for speed and privacy (2016)
#9Ublock Origin can easily block web fonts. Also, you can set this setting differently for each website.
Re: Blocking web fonts for speed and privacy (2016)
#10>Additionally, most of the time web fonts are downloaded from a third-party delivery network such as Google Web Fonts or Adobe Fonts. One of the advantages of using these systems is that the likelihood that a visitor’s browser already has a font cached locally from a previous visit to any other site using the same font is relatively high. That likelihood is relatively low (though not as low as JS CDNs). Modern browse…
> Google Web Fonts library preloaded in it
so that's just called installing fonts!
I think the idea of web fonts is so that new fonts could be added and a user doesn't have to do something local to the browser.
And this feature costs privacy. If people really understood the implications of loss of privacy, they would not want it. However, most people don't, and would gladly swap privacy for features (and then in the future complain about it when the implications becomes real or affects them).