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Blocking web fonts for speed and privacy (2016)

collinmbarrett.com

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Re: Blocking web fonts for speed and privacy (2016)

#101

Post by checkyoursudo »

eyelidlessness wrote: post #64
makeitdouble wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The absence of info can’t be “additional” info. It’s a differentiating factor, but at best it’s on par with any other single info you would have sent through the font fetching request. Arguably that single boolean characteristic (“fonts disabled”) is way less info than the dozens of characteristics you expose when fetching a font.

Disallowing font loading would be trivially used in fingerprinting. The non-boolean cascade of font fallbacks is too, but knowing that a user has a browsing context which should trigger one or more of those fallbacks, but doesn’t, is far more information than knowing that their browser behaves as expected.

How do you distinguish between passive failure and active disruption of your signal source? Unless you have yet another signal that can provide that information, then you cannot know that you have gained information by lack of original signal.

Re: Blocking web fonts for speed and privacy (2016)

#102

Post by ikt »

ffpip wrote: post #92
legitster wrote: post #76

> 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. As a person who works in martech it's patently bizarre to read this stuff. There's a difference between something being provent theoretically possible…

> There's a difference between something being provent theoretically possible in a laboratory environment and actually making it out in the real world. Fingerprinting using IP address, running scripts, canvas fingerprinting, using installed fonts, and checking what resources are cached/blocked are all things that are being widely used in many websites, and are not just "theoretically possible". They are even being so…

> Look at their customers - https://fingerprint.com/ .

Welp that's scary, can detect me when I'm on VPN, off it, in private browsing mode, different country in private browsing mode...

Re: Blocking web fonts for speed and privacy (2016)

#103

Post by lapsis_beeftech »

These benefits are all secondary; the main reason I block web fonts is that I cannot find a way to make my browser render text legibly using web fonts. With web fonts disabled through uBlock Origin text is rendered readable and never a blurry mess. Some poorly made web sites display alien glyphs for navigation with web fonts disabled but that is a minor annoyance I can usually work around.

Re: Blocking web fonts for speed and privacy (2016)

#104

Post by manigandham »

legitster wrote: post #76

> 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. As a person who works in martech it's patently bizarre to read this stuff. There's a difference between something being provent theoretically possible…

I've spent 12 years in adtech and built 3 ad platforms from the ground up.

Fingerprinting is used everywhere. It's a wide spectrum from basic metrics to very in-depth tracking, all depending on the scale, latency and functionality of each scenario. This can range from frequency capping to fraud detection to stopping bots, to uniquely identifying devices.

I will say that it's mostly used to improve UX by increasing security and limiting spam/bots/fraud but that doesn't mean its not used to track devices and people, although it's sold as targeted ad campaigns rather than specifically following individuals.

Re: Blocking web fonts for speed and privacy (2016)

#105

Post by dspillett »

hulitu wrote: post #83
phantomathkg wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A good design should have good fallback. Yes. A random example will be bbc.com, where BBC Reith fallback to Arial, Helvetica Free Sans and San serif. With modern web "application", the chances you see a bunch of text would either be the T&C page, documentation you read, or news website. These days we shop online as much as we do physically, so I pick two random clothing brand, Uniqlo and Levis. To create the same exp…

User experience is more than fonts. Most of the sites are unreadable at default browser zoom. Printing is almost impossible (i know, nobody prints those days). Gray on gray is the norm.

> Printing is almost impossible (i know, nobody prints those days)

I like to print things like Train times and such when heading out, just in case I need to alter plans and tech fails so I can't look up the next option online. When flying on holiday I have a little was of paper with connection details, luggage rules, etc. Printing is increasingly unusable direct from sites/apps so I've taken to either writing my own notes (which has the bonus of saving paper) or taking screenshots (which also saves paper as cropping allows less irrelevant detail & site chrome to be included).

I'm almost nobody in a large number of other respects too though!

Re: Blocking web fonts for speed and privacy (2016)

#106

Post by dngray »

cmeacham98 wrote: post #70
dngray wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This, it's also why it's in the category of "don't bother" https://github.com/arkenfox/user.js/wiki/4.1-Extensions#-don... not only that it will make your browser easier to fingerprint as one of the Tor developers pointed out.

+1, that guide is a beacon of light in the sea of misinformation about what extensions to use. I agree with almost everything on it.

Yes "we" (privacyguides.org) consult with the authors of that project as well as a few others.

It was nice to see they quoted our blog article https://www.privacyguides.org/blog/2021/12/01/firefox-privac...

We've been on a bit of a mission of trying to dissuade people from "old thinking" of installing a gazillion "privacy extensions".

Re: Blocking web fonts for speed and privacy (2016)

#107

Post by ogurechny »

9dev wrote: post #96
ogurechny wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let me explain how it actually works. I visit the website, see horrible text (because designer expected everyone to use high DPI screen or specific rasterization/hinting back-end), click on the icon to disable fonts, and then, yes, I am able to read the text. Which is the only reason I am on this page. Not even the slightest thought about page design appears in my head, just temporary irritation from the obstruction.

But you do realise that you’re part of a very small, albeit vocal, minority here? Most people actually do value a coherent visual design, which can be and repeatedly has been proven in studies and A/B testing. This holds true, whether you like it or not.

Have you seen what “regular people” do in such situations? They squint, reach for their glasses, or look for the page zoom controls (which takes a lot of their time). It's almost as if you are happy that those people are not tech savvy enough to use a quick fix (for the problem someone else introduced). It's almost as if the whole industry is based on exploiting the lack of education and understanding of those “regular people”.

You can also A/B test the guillotine vs human executioner. The best option is not always a good option.

Re: Blocking web fonts for speed and privacy (2016)

#110

Post by jeroenhd »

phantomathkg wrote: post #31

This is a very shortsighted view from developer who forget a web page is not only a bunch of text. Designer also play an important role to provide the subtle design element that developers don't value. By blocking all web fonts and fallback to only system font, you may still be able to read the text, but will completely missed the design.

Most developers suck at design but most designers suck at development.

If your designer can't make your website work well with one of the hundreds of fonts preloaded on my machine, I don't know what to tell you. If your website looks like crap because your designer couldn't come up with a good fallback font that's still on the designer.

It's like "web colours" all over again. Web designers should work within the constraints of the user agent or they shouldn't design for the web, and one of those constraints is that the font doesn't always look exactly like the designer wants it to look. It's called a user agent for a reason, these days more and more because the source it's rendering is as anti-user as can be.

I have web fonts turned off because I'm sick of text shifting because the particular Arial-but-not-really font a website insists on got loaded in. I've also occasionally had to use reader mode because the "design" was very fancy but practically unreadable.

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