>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…
Also, there's no particular reason why webfonts need to cost privacy. The only reason to ever hotlink Google Fonts was to either...
- Accelerate load times (which is dubious)
- Be slightly easier to implement for lazy developers
Google Fonts are all freely licensed and specifically allow you to rehost them. All you have to do is download the TTFs and link to them in a @font-face declaration.
Adobe Fonts are the ones you can't self-host, because the actual CDN is a vehicle for calculating and charging a licensing fee. The privacy risk is deliberate, in this case - font owners need to know how many pageviews sites are getting so they can be charged the correct amount. Even then, this is something that could be done by having each site report their own usage statistics... except then the font vendors have to trust you, and they don't want to do that.
