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Redesigned Google Fonts website

material.io

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Re: Redesigned Google Fonts website

#41

Post by toastal »

CDN+Web font-related PSAs:

Users: it’s a good idea to block all third-party fonts so you’re not leaking data (filter rule: *$font,third-party). Unlike scripts/styles, fonts generally don’t hurt the UX (unless a developer is using icon font which haven’t been best practice in a decade--which is ironic considering this blog is broken).

Developers: vendor these Google Fonts (most are licensed SIL) as other have noted in this thread & host them first-party for the benefit of your users. If the cost (hosting or performance) is too much to host the fonts, consider using less fonts because users are still paying for the bandwidth. (I am still pro-web fonts, as they can be in improvement on the UX, just be smart about it).

Re: Redesigned Google Fonts website

#42

Post by toastal »

jmprspret wrote: post #10
eek2121 wrote: post #2

Google fonts is just another way for Google to track users.

Not if you download the zip and host it yourself - which you can do

Most of them are available thru Nixpkgs too. You can make a small derivation to turn any font into WOFF2 with GNU Parallel + `fontforge --lang=ff -c 'Open($1); Generate($2);' {} $out/{/.}.woff2`.

Re: Redesigned Google Fonts website

#43

Post by niederman »

eek2121 wrote: post #2

Google fonts is just another way for Google to track users.

This is one purpose of Google fonts, but it's not the only purpose.

Google has nearly 100% search market share, so one of the only ways that they can increase search traffic at this point is by increasing web traffic in general. One of the ways they do this is by making it easier to create web content by e.g. distributing fonts.

See Gwern Branwen's excellent article on the subject: https://gwern.net/complement

Re: Redesigned Google Fonts website

#44

Post by V__ »

toastal wrote: post #41

CDN+Web font-related PSAs: Users: it’s a good idea to block all third-party fonts so you’re not leaking data (filter rule: *$font,third-party). Unlike scripts/styles, fonts generally don’t hurt the UX (unless a developer is using icon font which haven’t been best practice in a decade--which is ironic considering this blog is broken). Developers: vendor these Google Fonts (most are licensed SIL) as other have noted in…

Fyi: Under GDPR you have to host these fonts yourself.

Re: Redesigned Google Fonts website

#45

Post by formerly_proven »

toastal wrote: post #41

CDN+Web font-related PSAs: Users: it’s a good idea to block all third-party fonts so you’re not leaking data (filter rule: *$font,third-party). Unlike scripts/styles, fonts generally don’t hurt the UX (unless a developer is using icon font which haven’t been best practice in a decade--which is ironic considering this blog is broken). Developers: vendor these Google Fonts (most are licensed SIL) as other have noted in…

CDNs (the kind where a third-party domain shows up in your HTML) have been largely pointless for a long time anyway and were probably purely around for generating metadata in the last couple years, since browsers segregate all caches by top-level origin. So ten years ago "but what if the user already was on a site using the same exact version of jQuery/font/whatever has already been to another site using the same CDN, then that might be cached and save 50 kB" turned into "it will always be downloaded" years ago.

Re: Redesigned Google Fonts website

#46

Post by rpastuszak »

toastal wrote: post #41

CDN+Web font-related PSAs: Users: it’s a good idea to block all third-party fonts so you’re not leaking data (filter rule: *$font,third-party). Unlike scripts/styles, fonts generally don’t hurt the UX (unless a developer is using icon font which haven’t been best practice in a decade--which is ironic considering this blog is broken). Developers: vendor these Google Fonts (most are licensed SIL) as other have noted in…

Psst https://fontsource.org/ Is a really good, privacy-friendly Google Fonts alternative.

Re: Redesigned Google Fonts website

#47

Post by rawrawrawrr »

The old design made it easy to copy paste some CSS to use Google's CDN to add fonts to a website. With the new design, I have no idea how to do this. Am I stupid?

Edit: Pressing Select [font name] + adds it to a "shopping cart", where it displays the code to copy it to a website. I am dumb.

Re: Redesigned Google Fonts website

#48

Post by rpastuszak »

Tip: more privacy friendly Google alternatives are available and super easy to use: https://fontsource.org/

I switched most of my sites to use it and I’ve been quite happy so far. It just works.

No need to leak data to Google.

For weirder stuff (e.g. https://tidings.potato.horse) I use sites like dafont.com and convert fonts using Font Squirrel.

Re: Redesigned Google Fonts website

#49

Post by chrisco255 »

innocenat wrote: post #23
chrisco255 wrote: post #21

So I tried to select for only Latin fonts (should be the default), and it refuses to filter by them, showing me about 3 or 4 alphabets I've never even heard of in the top 5 results.

I believe the selector for 'Latin' meant 'Families that include basic Latin glyph'. Which is pretty much all families.

Super unfortunate, I mean, I'm sure the font nerds are geeking out about the #2 listing Noto Sans Old Permic, an alphabet for a language which only about 500K people speak on planet earth (and probably much fewer type). And the #3 listing Noto Sans Sagdian, a language and alphabet that's been dead since the 11th century, but for the vast majority of us just looking for true Latin font faces, it's not helpful at all.

Re: Redesigned Google Fonts website

#50

Post by toastal »

formerly_proven wrote: post #45
toastal wrote: post #41

CDN+Web font-related PSAs: Users: it’s a good idea to block all third-party fonts so you’re not leaking data (filter rule: *$font,third-party). Unlike scripts/styles, fonts generally don’t hurt the UX (unless a developer is using icon font which haven’t been best practice in a decade--which is ironic considering this blog is broken). Developers: vendor these Google Fonts (most are licensed SIL) as other have noted in…

CDNs (the kind where a third-party domain shows up in your HTML) have been largely pointless for a long time anyway and were probably purely around for generating metadata in the last couple years, since browsers segregate all caches by top-level origin. So ten years ago "but what if the user already was on a site using the same exact version of jQuery/font/whatever has already been to another site using the same CDN…

Folks interested in reading more about this assertion: Public CDNs Are Useless and Dangerous https://httptoolkit.tech/blog/public-cdn-risks/>
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